Former "Poet" Laureate "Sir" Andrew Motion is in trouble with a historian, Ben Shephard, who accuses him of the most heinous of literary crimes -- something that "begins with 'p' and it isn't poetry", as Shephard puts it.
Motion's poem, "An Equal Voice", was published in the Guardian on Saturday as a tribute to war veterans. Shephard couldn't help noticing that five of the eight stanzas were almost identical to passages from his own book, "A war of nerves", which featured quotes from soldiers who had experienced shell-shock. The other three stanzas also sample Shephard's work, though to prove that Motion can so do his research. there are also a few excerpts from another writer, the WW1 poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Motion has decided that the best defence is a good offence. He claims his work is in keeping with an honourable and ancient tradition of "found poetry". Well, as my mother would have said, he found it before it was lost.
To my mind, Motion only compounds the felony by attempting to name and shame William Shakespeare for a similar offence. I used to think Motion was just a really bad poet; I hadn't realised he was deeply deluded. To misquote Muhammad Ali only slightly, "if Andrew Motion even dreamed he was like William Shakespeare, he'd have to apologise".
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