News at Eleven: And the Oxford professorship?

How badly burned did he feel? "I don't think ultimately I wanted the job," he says. "It would have been too much work. I'm not a good scholar. Like [Walt] Whitman, I contradict myself very quickly, and you can't have an academic who does that." Why did he withdraw from the election? "I felt if I was disgracing people, I'd better get out of there." In any case, he says, "being in the Caribbean and being professor of poetry at Oxford was a contradiction." Which is why, in the end, the only way was Essex.

from The Guardian: Derek Walcott: 'The Oxford poetry job would have been too much work'

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