For Competition 3463 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem in the style of a well-known poet, the first letters of each line spelling out the poet’s name.
Initials were allowed but I disqualified diminutives such as Will and Bill for Wordsworth and McGonagall. In a medium-sized, accomplished entry, Elizabeth Kay, Richard Warren, Bob Newman, J.R. Johnson and Mike Gower stood out. The £25 John Lewis vouchers go to those entries printed below, led by Basil Ransome-Davies’s twist on Empson’s ‘Just a Smack at Auden’.
Shall we cop a plea, guys, eager for a part,
Idle but not free, guys, waiting for a start,
Riding for a spree, guys, on a rubbish cart?
