How should competition in poetry be viewed?
Dueling wordsmiths are nothing new. In Athens 2,500 years ago, at the four-day spring religious festival known as the Dionysia, writers competed for prizes awarded by the city leaders. Athenian authorities pre-selected for competition three poets in tragedy and three in comedy. After the first day’s choral hymns to the gods, the next three days were devoted to the competition – three tragedies and one comedy each day. The works were performed in open-air amphitheaters seating up to 17,000 spectators. The great champion of the Dionysia was Sophocles (ca 496-406 B.C.), author of Oedipus Rex and Antigone, who took first place at least 24 times and never finished lower than second place. Some of the great English Romantic poets amused themselves with poetry sprints. John Keats, for example, wrote ‘On the Grasshopper and the Cricket’ in a sonnet-writing contest with Leigh Hunt in December 1816. Keats, Hunt and Percy Shelley wrote poems in 1818 about the River Nile in a contest in which they
