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Updated: June 12, 2025
"I mean, after Tennyson's death," I myself wrote to Philip Hamerton, "to be Poet-laureate!" From these samples of our callow speech, the modesty of our ambition may be inferred. Well, it all happened just as we planned, only otherwise!
It was in this way that Skelton was made laureate, first by Oxford, then by Louvain in Belgium, and thirdly by Cambridge, so that in his day he was considered a learned man and a great poet. He was a friend of Caxton and helped him with one of his books. "I pray, maister Skelton, late created poet-laureate in the university of Oxenford," says Caxton, "to oversee and correct this said book."
Here, with swinging gait, wanders the queen's piper, a sort of poet-laureate of the bagpipes, arrayed in plaid and carrying upon his arm the soft, enchanting instrument to the music of which, no doubt, the queen herself dances. The music of the orchestra is perfect, and he must be a dull man who does not feel the festivity, the buoyancy and the elation of the scene.
There is another beautiful song that I follow whenever I hear it, straining my eyes to the treetops, yet never finding a bird that I can identify as the singer. Can it be the "Ousel-cock so black of hue, With orange-tawny bill"? He is called the poet-laureate of the primrose time, but I don't know whether he sings in midsummer, and I have not seen him hereabouts.
I was no longer to be the future poet-laureate; I was no more enticed to sing great deeds, but to do them. The sword was to displace the pen, the hero the poet. Verse was too effeminate, and rhyme was severely interdicted, and to be forgiven only when it was produced by accident. He was some time before he brought Mrs Cherfeuil over to his opinions.
This was in the last part of the freshman year, and later on I became a sort of amateur, class poet-laureate. Many were the skits I composed, and Tom sang them.... During that freshman year we often encountered Hermann Krebs, whistling merrily, on the stairs. "Got your themes done?" he would inquire cheerfully. And Tom would always mutter, when he was out of earshot: "He has got a crust!"
After Tennyson's death, in 1892, Swinburne was the greatest living English poet; but, even if his verse had not offended Queen Victoria for the foregoing reasons, she would not have appointed him poet-laureate after the misery of the Russians had moved him in 1890 to write, referring to the Czar: "Night hath naught but one red star Tyrannicide.
Nicholas Rowe, poet-laureate to King George I., wrote a life of Shakespeare in the early years of the eighteenth century, and we owe to him a statement, founded upon such information as a lapse of a century could validate, that Shakespeare spent the last years of his life enjoying "ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends."
We next find Hutten high in the favor of the Emperor Maximilian, by whose order he was crowned poet-laureate of Germany. The wreath of laurel was woven by the fair hands of Constance Peutinger, who was called the handsomest girl in Germany, and with great ceremony she put this wreath on his head in the presence of the Emperor at Mainz.
The books, the statues, all the glorious souvenirs of the poet-laureate, came to Barcelona to adorn the sailor's home. The little Telemachus amused himself pulling apart the old wreaths of the troubador, and tearing out the old prints from his volumes with the inconsequence of a lively child whose father is very far away and who knows that he is idolized by two indulgent ladies.
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