AS SIR JOHN MAJOR demonstrated in The Times earlier this week, something about cricket lends itself to poetry: no other sport has inspired so much verse, some of it execrable, but much of it genuinely good.

Cricket is the exception to the rule that British sport and literature do not mix. Some of the greatest American writers — Hemingway, Updike, Mailer, Roth — have celebrated American sports, most notably baseball. But the British sporting literary tradition is comparatively sparse: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, Eric Cantona on seagulls (at a pinch), and that’s about it. There are very few good poems about hockey, tennis or tiddlywinks. As a teenager I wrote a poem about Chris Evert, which was not only unpublishable, but unprintable.

Cricket, by contrast, has produced poetry in swaths. Wordsworth, Tennyson, Betjeman, Housman, Chesterton and Hughes have all gone out to bat for cricket, in verse. Byron got distinctly sweaty extolling the “manly toil” of cricket. A. A. Milne wrote an entire ode to his cricket bat:

Revered, beloved, O you whose job Is but to serve throughout the season, To make, if so be it, a blob.

Some writers have been first-class cricketers (Samuel Beckett was a fine left-hand opening bat and seam bowler, with the distinction of appearing in Wisden), and a few cricketers have made good poets. John Snow’s poetry was like his bowling: tense, fast and slightly peculiar. When Arthur Conan Doyle took the wicket of W. G. Grace when representing the MCC, he naturally wrote a 19-verse heroic poem in self-celebration.

Cricket makes for good poetry because, of course, cricket is poetry. This is a sport measured out in metre and stanzas, in line and length. Every over is a verse. Every innings is a poem: sometimes an epic, sometimes merely a haiku. God, being English, clearly intended the sport to be poetic, which is why he got matters off to a good start by rhyming “cricket” with “wicket” (and, for that matter, “snick it”). Above all, cricket furnishes the time necessary for poetry: not 90 minutes of crammed action, but five full days in which to assemble thoughts in verse, ball by ball, line by line.

Elegant, languorous, as English as bicycle clips, cricket poetry tends towards the elegiac, a search for a lost past. The novelist J. L. Carr caught the mystical, time-defying gentleness of the game when he recalled a day of missed trains and placid cricket in The First Saturday in May — “I am left remembering the heat of day, the burden of fielding ankle-deep in Bridgnorth’s cattle-mart, snow storms of hillside blossom. And wondering if a change of trains, or for that matter, a change of anything, really is for the better.”

By contrast, and at its worst, much cricket poetry slips into the easy cliché of leather on willow, the misty and shallow nostalgia to which educated Englishmen of the middle class are prone. The most famous cricket poem of all, Sir Henry Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada (1897), is an anthem of death, eliding the last heroic wicket stand in a cricket match with a soldier’s last stand in some corner of a foreign field:

There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight
Ten to make and the match to win . . .
The sand of the desert is sodden red,
Red with the wreck of the square that broke . . .
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies in the ranks:
“Play up! Play up! And play the game.”

A generation of cricket-mad Englishmen marched off to the First World War reciting this exhortation to self-sacrifice. As David Rayvern Allen points out in his anthology of cricket verse, Newbolt himself was dismayed at what he had wrought, noting that his poem had become a sort of imperial apologia for slaughter: “They put it on their flags, and their war memorials and tombstones.”

But at the other extreme from the mawkish doggerel, cricket offers opportunities for celebrating the humiliation and rich self-mockery of the game. Richard Stilgoe memorably satirised some of cricket’s dinosaurs:

They batted through the Stone Age, the scores became colossal, Boycottodon was in so long he turned into a fossil.

Kevin Pietersen might care to memorise P.G. Wodehouse’s poem about failing to hold on to a dolly: All was peace till I bungled that catch. Poets have always delighted in celebrating their cricket failures, but care should be taken when distributing one’s own cricket poetry. Harold Pinter famously wrote a two-line poem on the death of Len Hutton and sent it to his friends:

I saw Hutton in his prime.
Another time, another time.

Some weeks later Pinter asked his fellow writer and friend, Simon Gray, what he thought of the ode and got a delightful leg glance in reply: “Er, sorry Harold, I haven’t quite finished it yet.”

A form of narrative cricket poetry flourished in England during the 18th and 19th centuries, in which entire games would be committed to verse, scorebooks in verse: long, minutely detailed and, when read today, heroically boring.

A similar, though far livelier, tradition survives in the West Indies where calypsos tell the story of the game in lilting, sometimes almost spontaneous ballads. The most famous of these was Egbert Moore’s Victory Calypso after the West Indies beat England for the first time at Lord’s in 1950, with the refrain: With those two little pals of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine.

Even Australian cricket, for all its macho reputation, has found inspiration in poetry. In 2001 Steve Waugh, that most cultured of cricket captains, ruled that each member of his team should take it in turn to write a verse for his team-mates, either just a couplet or, if they wished, an entire poem. Some wrote pages. The effects, Waugh said, were inspiring, with Shane Warne, as ever, producing a match-winning performance with a poem, in his own words, that “wasn’t quite a tear-jerker, more a motivational-type thing”.

In a sport suffused with the poet’s art, it seems only right that the world’s greatest cricketer should not only bowl poetry, but write it too.

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