The 53-year-old openly lesbian poet will join the ranks of great literary masters including John Dryden (the first to hold the post), William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson and John Betjeman. Her work will include penning poems for major state occasions and events involving the Royal Family.

An official announcement will be made by the Culture Secretary Andy Burnham in the coming hours or days informing the public of the new Poet Laureate. Having missed out on the position before due to Tony Blair’s concern over Middle England’s views of a lesbian holding the post, the news will be greeted warmly by gay rights groups.

She succeeds Andrew Motion who stated earlier in the week that he was “relieved” to be leaving the job. The announcement will be made at Manchester University’s John Rylands Library.

You can read an earlier post of mine on this subject here: Carol Ann Duffy to be First Female Poet Laureate.

One of her most well known poetry books is Rapture which is a T.S. Eliot Prize winning collection. It’s a book-length love-poem and a moving act of personal testimony through the human emotions of infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation, and grief. With poems that will find deep resonance in the experience of most readers, it is a collection that can and does speak for us all.

This is not the first time she has been put forward for the position. In 1999, after the death of the then incumbent Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, she narrowly lost out to Andrew Motion. Many critics claim her loss was because of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s concern with how her homosexuality would fare with Middle England.

A rather bitter Duffy said retorted: “I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie (Earl and Countess of Wessex). No self-respecting poet should have to.”

Carol Ann Duffy was born in the Scottish city of Glasgow in 1955. At the age of 4, she and her family moved to Staffordshire in England. She went on to be educated at Saint Austin Roman Catholic Primary School, St. Joseph’s Convent School and Stafford Girls’ High School before studying philosophy from Liverpool University in 1977.

Her first collection of poetry Standing Female Nude was published in 1985. Ten years later, in 1995 she was awarded an OBE and then in 2001, a CBE. Duffy’s popularity has soared over the last couple of decades and she has even become part of the school syllabus in England and Wales.

Journalist Katharine Viner said of Ms Duffy:

“Her poems are accessible and entertaining, yet her form is classical, her technique razor-sharp. She is read by people who don’t really read poetry, yet she maintains the respect of her peers. Reviewers praise her touching, sensitive, witty evocations of love, loss, dislocation, nostalgia; fans talk of greeting her at readings ‘with claps and cheers that would not sound out of place at a pop concert’”.

An announcement on whether she will become Britain’s next Poet Laureate is expected in the coming week after the Queen’s approval. If she is promoted to the position she can expect to earn an annual salary of £5,000 in place of the ancient stipend of a “butt of sack”. She’s also be expected to write poems for the Royal Family and attend major literary events.

See: Carol Ann Duffy is the New British Poet Laureate.

Most of contemporary poetry she goes on to say is frustratingly incomprehensible and vague and at worst, self-indulgent. Many of Britain’s best known writers have been deeply offended as a result.

Wendy Cope, a former short-listed poet for the 2001 Whitbread Poetry award said: ‘Joanna Lumley might be widely read, but sometimes people who make comments like this don’t know very much about poetry. People make very good poetry out of the humdrum and commonplace. There are lots of poets writing good poetry that is obscure, and the answer is to educate the public to help them understand that.’

The BBC Radio 3 presenter Ian McMillan, who is widely tipped to be the next Poet Laureate also launched an attack on Lumley’s choice of words. ‘It’s sad and frustrating that people can still come up with generalisations like this. You shouldn’t be able to get poems on the first reading. Part of the delight is the time you take with them to understand them,’ he said. ‘But what’s wrong with humdrum and commonplace, anyway? Frank O’Hara called his poems “lunch poems” because he wrote them in his lunch hour. By the act of writing down his humdrum, it became delightful.’

Other critics of Lumley’s remarks included Dannie Abse, the winner of the Wales Book of the Year award and poetry critic Al Alvarez both of whom directed, perhaps rather unjustly, their attacks at the 62-year-old’s age.

‘This is such an old-fashioned remark. It is not well-informed. In the old days people said modern poetry was obscure, but now people everywhere read it. It is true that most poetry is very bad, but this is true of all poetry in all times.’ said Abse.

However there are many people who share Joanna Lumley’s views including the actor, novelist and comedian Stephen Fry who termed the work produced by many modern poets as ‘arse-dribble’.

Liz Cowley, whose introduction Lumley was writing, also demonstrated her support and said: ‘The problem is that Britain no longer has a cultural voice: it’s all so messy and muddled because people aren’t educated to write word constructions any more. With rare exceptions, I stopped enjoying poetry written any time after the 18th century.’

The debate is set to continue after the former professor of poetry at Oxford University James Fenton added: ‘Poetry has a large audience in the UK and that’s because it hasn’t been obscure for quite a long time. She’s thinking back, perhaps, to the obscurity of modernism, but there’s been a lot of ink spilled since TS Eliot and Ezra Pound.’

In 1985, Joanna Lumley was on the panel of judges for the Booker Prize.