ON the day that the new Poet Laureate was announced I happened to visit a home of perhaps our best-known Laureate, William Wordsworth.

Whenever a new Poet Laureate is appointed today it is emphasised that there is “no longer’’ any pressure on the holder to churn out verse for public occasions, notably Royal events. Well, displayed in Rydal Mount, near Ambleside, where Wordsworth lived for the last 37 years of his life, is a letter from the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, urging him to take the Laureate post.

The letter promised “that you shall have nothing required of you’’. Just three days short of his 73rd birthday, Wordsworth took him at his word and never composed a line of verse for the remaining seven years of his life.

The appointment of the Laureate also brings debate over whether it is an anachronism.

Its greatest justification is that it recognises the special place poetry holds among our nation’s artistic achievements.

We can’t claim that British art or music heads the international premier league in these fields. But few other nations have a richer poetic heritage than our own. It is the single art in which, arguably, we lead the world. A token of this fact, the Laureateship is all the more welcome now for running on a ten year cycle instead of for life.

The rise of the new Laureate, 53-year-old Carol Ann Duffy, is striking. She confirmed her appointment on Woman’s Hour. Yet in 1996, an anthology of women’s poetry produced to mark the 50th anniversary of Woman’s Hour contained nothing by Duffy, whose first volume had appeared 11 years earlier. Nor is she represented in a muchpraised anthology of contemporary verse, New Blood, published by Newcastle-based Bloodaxe in 1999.

Yet Tony Blair is said to have vetoed her appointment as Laureate in that year because of her lesbianism. Another woman poet, UA (Ursula) Fanthorpe, was also ruled out for the same reason.

Fanthorpe died, aged 79, just days before Carol Ann Duffy’s appointment was announced.

Had she been Poet Laureate I’m sure she would made a huge success of it and become well known. One of her poems celebrates what she calls “a kind of love called maintenance,
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget The milkman. . .
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dry-rotten jokes, remembers
My need for gloss and grouting. . .

Somehow, Carol Ann Duffy’s work has evaded me, though she is said to be Britain’s best-read living poet. She says she has accepted the Laureate role “as a recognition of the great woman poets we have writing now.’’ But should gender come into it? Duffy has gained the job because she is considered the best poet for it. She rightly says the role is important because it “draws attention to the central role that poetry can play in the lives of ordinary people.’’ This newspaper’s weekly readers’ poems illustrate the point.

WHAT more heartening news event than Paul Gascoigne’s happy appearance in the Darlington FC charity match? None. Congratulations Paul, and good luck.