Even if one forms the subset from the set of those interested in literature and the set of those interested in sport, there is a substantial proportion who do not know of the many poems that feature sport. Not only are there many hundreds of such poems, but there is a substantial corpus of good poetry within that number.

On the other hand, great world poets of the 20th century, such as Anna Akhmatova, Juan Luis Borges, T S Eliot, Odysseus Elytis, Garcia Lorca, Somhairle MacGill-Eain, Pablo Neruda, Ezra Pound, W B Yeats, and others, have, collectively, written little about sport. An outstanding exception is Lorca's magnificent Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias.¹

In some cases this may have been due to a misplaced feeling of contempt, as implied by Kipling's “ . . .the flannelled fools at the wicket/The muddied oafs at the goals”, and Yeats²: “If beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body, or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport.”

However, Pablo Neruda,³ in his 1935 advocation of “Impure poetry” could talk of: “ . . .a poetry consistent with shameful, disgraceful deeds; with dreams, observations, sleepless nights, presentiments, eruptions of hatred and love; animals, idylls, shocks; negotiations, ideologies, assertions, doubts, tax demands . . .” Sport, in all its facets, could easily slip onto to such a list.

One difficulty for poets is that sport is an activity that has to be actively sought out, either as spectator or participant. In major events, access is especially hard, and television—for the poet—is not at all a satisfactory substitute. …