Oxford’s professor of poetry, Sir Geoffrey Hill, has rapped Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, over the knuckles over her linking of modern poetry with texting. In a lecture at Oxford entitled Poetry, Policing and Public Order, Hill, who was knighted in last month’s New Year honours, and is known for the “difficulty” of his own poetry, said: “When the laureate speaks of the tremendous potential for a vital new poetry to be drawn from the practice of texting she is policing her patch. And when I beg her with all due respect to her high office to consider that she may be wrong, I am policing mine.”

Hill went on to criticise the language of one of Duffy’s early poems that was quoted in an article in the Guardian, saying: “For the common good she is willing to have quoted by the Guardian interviewer several lines from a poem by herself that could be easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage.

“This is democratic English pared to its barest bean and I would not myself have the moral courage to write so. My simultaneous incompatible response is this is not democratic English but cast-off bits of oligarchical commodity English such as is employed by writers for Mills & Boon and by celebrity critics appearing on A Good Read or the Andrew Marr show.”

After a grammar school education in Bromsgrove, Hill studied English at Keble College, Oxford before embarking on an academic career. Duffy was born in the Gorbals in Glasgow, in a  “bookless house”, and is now professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Duffy has not responded to the criticism so far. Of course, she may do so in a poem.