The next Oxford professor of poetry will be elected on 16 May 2009 following a vote by ‘members of Convocation’—an electorate principally comprising recipients of a degree from the university, excluding honorary degrees.
The professorship was created with a bequest from the Latin poet, Henry Birkhead (1617-1696) ‘to maintain...for ever a Publick Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford’, of whom the first was Joseph Trapp in 1708. Since then there have been forty-four holders of the post, including Thomas Warton (1718-28, who, like Cecil Day-Lewis, was also poet laureate), and in the nineteenth century John Keble (1831-42) and Matthew Arnold (1857-67).
The following is a list of holders of the poetry chair since 1901 whose biographies appear in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published by OUP. The Oxford DNB is an online collection of 57,000 biographies of men and women who have shaped British history and who died in or before 2005. It is available free, at home, via British public libraries and many other libraries worldwide.
To read more about former Oxford professors of poetry, simply click on a name to go to a free version of the Oxford DNB biography. Further information on living poets is available via the online edition of Who’s Who, also published by OUP.
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