POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY

A modern Browne medal, struck in bronze. This is the reverse, showing Apollo crowning a scholar with a laurel wreath. (Original item not on display.)

The ‘campus poet’ is a twentieth-century phenomenon, but poetry and education have been connected since Aristotle lectured on poetics at the Lyceum in Athens in the fourth century BC. The central place of Rhetoric in the curriculum of the medieval and early-modern university fostered both the study and the writing of poetry, and the ability to compose graceful verses was deemed as worthy an accomplishment in a scholar as it was in a courtier.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries prizes were endowed in Cambridge to encourage the writing of poetry, in English and in classical languages, among members of the University. These benefactions survive to the present day, and medals have been offered in recent years for Greek and Latin epigrams on themes such as spin-doctors, mobile phones, and Posh ‘n’ Becks.

Items on display:

MS Kk.3.21: Boethius, ‘Philosophiæ consolatio’, eleventh century, open at a heavily-glossed portion of metrical text. MS Ff.6.4: Terence, ‘Comœdiæ sex cum commentariis’, fifteenth century, open at a scholastic ‘essay’ discussing the study of poetical works. MS Add. 8915: ‘Orationes et carmina acadamiæ Cantabr: ad Elizab: reginam 1564’ (Cambridge verses for Queen Elizabeth). MS Add. 3873: Tripos verses, late sixteenth century. MS Ff.2.9: William Alabaster, ‘Roxana’, a university play in verse, seventeenth century. MS Add. 4154: Musæ Seatonianæ (London: printed by T. Wright for G. Pearch et al.), open at a handwritten copy of Charles Peter Layard’s poem on ‘Duelling’ (winner of the Seatonian Prize). CUA Char.I.4: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ode on the theme ‘Sors misera servorum in insulis Indiae occidentalis’ 1792 (winner of a Browne medal). MS Add. 8812/58: William Chapman Kinglake, ‘Byzantium’ 1830 (winner of the Chancellor’s Medal). CUA ENGL/1/155: Ted Hughes, ‘The ear-witness account of a poetry-reading in Throttle College, before the small poets grew up into infinitesimal critics’, 1953. A Chancellor’s Medal for an English Poem.