Americans should be proud of their Poet Laureates
It isn’t often I’ll say this — and, in fact, I hope this is the only time — but as a Brit, I’m jealous of you Americans. It isn’t the fact that you have a notionally more functional government than us, or even that you have unrestrained access to things like Pop Tarts and peanut butter cups. No, the answer lies, as it always does, in poetry. Over on this side of the Atlantic, we’ve had a Poet Laureate since 1668 — when John Dryden was given a position in the royal household by Charles II. We could claim to have had one even earlier, given that the versifier, playwright, and scribbler Ben Jonson was given a pension by James I in England way back in 1616.
