Craig Raine poem prompts Twitterstorm

Seventy-year-old poet’s Gatwick, fantasising about a young airport worker, unleashes stream of parodies

The poet Craig Raine is no stranger to the sexually risqué - his very first collection, The Onion, Memory, famously quoted the morning-after fantasy of the lascivious butler who Henry Green said had inspired his novel Loving. The borrowed line, in Raine’s poem Bed & Breakfast, involved fingers and buttered toast, and - combined with the image “five pink farrow suckle at each foot” - prompted reviewer Gavin Ewart to reflect: “When the Metaphysicals went too far, weren’t they a bit like this?”

But Bed & Breakfast was published in the days before Twitter, where Raine’s latest poem, printed in this week’s issue of the LRB, has unleashed a stream of parodies.

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