Popular Poet Banned

Carol Ann Duffy, one of Britain’s most popular poets, has this week had one of her poems removed from the GCSE syllabus because it ‘glorifies knife crime’, according to exam board AQA.

The poem in question, ‘Education for Leisure’, contains the line ‘today I am going to kill something’ and features the poem’s person walking through the streets carrying a knife. Carol Ann Duffy’s poems have been studied by GCSE and A Level students for many years.

Many have spoken out against the removal of the poem, with Duffy’s agent commenting that “It’s an anti-violence poem. It is a plea for education.” The decision to remove the poem comes at a time when knife crime carried out by young people has seen a sharp increase. However, it has been suggested that the increase in knife crime is unlikely to be aggravated by poetry.

Carol Ann Duffy responded by publishing a poem in The Guardian newspaper, entitled ‘Mrs. Schofield’s GCSE’, in which she comments on the fact that many of Shakespeare’s plays, which are also studied at GCSE level, contain knife-related violence, such as Othello’s murder of his wife and Tybalt’s stabbing in ‘Romeo and Juliet’.