The Newdigate is Oxford's annual poetry prize, and it goes for a... they commission a poem with a certain title, and my year... the year before me it was Captain Carlson who was a newspaper name, because he'd stayed with his ship when it was sinking. My year, it was Exile - that fashionable, existential term - and I was out of my country for the first time, and so I took the title and ran with it. I was only slightly disconcerted by the notice that was posted for the exam which said... I doubt that they do it anymore... the poem need not be written in heroic couplets. The Newdigates were always about 300 lines, and the longest poem I had ever written was 48, so I stretched myself. During Christmas vacation, and again at Easter time, I spent the six week vacation in Paris having a wonderful time in a little hotel. And every morning I would wake up and the petite bonne would bring me coffee and croissant, and I would lie in bed and work on this poem all day - well not all day, all morning. And I would begin to think about what I'd have for lunch and supper during the day. The afternoon I would usually go to a museum. This was in Paris, but that's where I wrote the poem called Exile, which won the Newdigate, and caused a lot of stir. It caused a stir largely because the Chancellor's Essay Prize [sic] went, at about the same time, to an American, and an American was for the first time elected president of the Oxford Union, so that - Yanks take over Oxford you know... the scene. And Time magazine wrote a piece about it, printed our pictures, and it kept me out of the Korean War, curiously enough. I had... the Korean War had started when I was a senior, and I was examined and about to be drafted, but students got deferred and then graduate students got deferred, and I was at Oxford, but there were Americans who were rich and went in and enrolled at the Sorbonne and didn't do anything, and got a left-wing professor to sign for them. So that the Director of Selected Service in America issued a ruling that only Fulbright scholars and Rhodes' would be exempt if they were at a European, foreign university. Without my knowing it, my father took a copy of Time magazine down to the Appeals Board... to the Draft Board in New Haven, and they exempted me from the draft. So I stayed on for a second year, instead of going to Korea.
