W. H. AUDEN would doubtless have been delighted that, 33 years after his death, his poetry is still capable of stirring passions.

A school in Reno, Nevada, has attempted to ban a 14-year-old boy from reciting The More Loving One by the gay British poet on the grounds that the verse contains “profanity” and “poor language”.

This week Jacob Behymer-Smith won a restraining order from a federal judge against the Coral Academy of Science, which should allow him to read the poem in a state-wide competition at the Governor’s mansion.

The lines in question might appear fairly innocent by the standards of some literature. “Looking up at the stars, I know quite well/That, for all they care, I can go to hell”, was one example that the school found unacceptable. “Admirer as I think I am/Of stars that do not give a damn”, was another.

But after Jacob recited them in a district contest ten days ago, Steven West, the school’s human resources dean, ordered him to select another poem.

He issued a memo to teachers and students, advising them that there would be no tolerance of “use (of) poor language in public events”.

Cheryl Garlock, the dean of the academy, said that her policy was to present children only with “pristine” language.

Jacob said that he felt “completely disgusted and appalled by (the) school’s decision”.

At the court hearing on Wednesday, he told the judge that he had practised reciting the poem twice a day for two months, and that forcing him to choose another would be unfair. In granting the injunction, Judge Brian Sandoval said that there was “a total absence of any evidence” that the school’s ban was legal under the US Constitution and that Jacob’s First Amendment rights to free speech were probably being violated.

Nevada’s attempted poetry censorship is not an isolated case in a country where there appears once again to be growing tension between free speech and public morals.

Last year parents at Shorewood High School, in Seattle, complained about a literary magazine that contained a poem about a teenager’s first sexual experience. The fallout prompted school and district officials to seize, shred and reprint the issue, while moving the magazine’s editor — a teacher with 35 years’ experience — to another post.

At the same time Gerald Allen, an Alabama state representative, introduced a Bill that would prohibit school libraries from stocking books written by gay authors or about gay characters. “I don’t look at it as censorship,” said Mr Allen. “I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.”

Last month US broadcasters were hit with record-breaking fines of almost $4 million

(£2.3 million) by a standards’ watchdog, which decreed that even casual use of the word s*** was a threat to the “peace and quiet of the home”.

The Federal Communications Commission, chaired by Kevin Martin, a Republican appointed by President Bush, has made clear that it wishes to crack down on indecency. Even the use of the word “bulls***” engenders in the mind of the viewer disgusting images of “excrement”, it said in a report.

It is all a long way from the days of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation. His poem Howl was the subject of a famous court case in 1957, at which publishers were cleared of selling obscene material.

Mr Ginsberg said of Howl, which has “f***s” scattered throughout, that he “thought to disseminate a poem so strong that a clean Saxon four-letter word might enter high school anthologies permanently and deflate tendencies toward authoritarian strong-arming”.

It is unlikely that administrators at Coral Academy of Science would agree.

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