'We shouldn't be surprised that an Oxbridge exam paper pits Amy Winehouse against Raleigh'

I had a kind, haggard old hippy of an English teacher at school. Didn't everyone? He would sometimes steal the class's attention by swearing with the self-conscious gusto of a toddler breaking boundaries for effect. 'What Byron is talking about here... [pause] is fucking [raise eyebrow in conspiratorial-triumphal arch].'

He would sneak Bob Dylan lyrics into his poetry handouts, alongside Auden and Larkin. It wasn't as radical then, in the late Eighties, as it would have been 20 years earlier, but it still felt a bit subversive. The idea that popular culture might merit the same critical appraisal as canonical work was still mildly controversial. Now it is orthodoxy. Students sitting their final-year English Literature exams at Cambridge this year were asked to compare 'As You Came from the Holy Land' by Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) with the lyrics of 'Love is a Losing Game' by soul singer Amy Winehouse (1983- ).

I imagine the don who set the paper, anticipating the disorientation students would feel on bumping into Amy Winehouse in the exam room, wore an expression of naughty self-satisfaction like the one mastered by my old English teacher.

But only the most cosseted undergraduate would be surprised to see a contemporary musician ranked alongside the starched ruff brigade of Eng Lit textbooks. That is because anyone who has happened across real life in the last few years, perhaps by turning on the radio, will know that Britain is in the midst of a lyrical Golden Age. As it happens, Winehouse, all adolescent angst and Sixties nostalgia, is a remarkably poor example. Her best claim to be a poet is that, in her self-destructing narcissism, she conforms to a Romantic ideal of alienated youth. But her decadent forebears expanded their horizons a bit further than the pub round the corner. Rimbaud (an influence cited by that other self-styled bard of debauchery Pete Doherty) ended up as an arms dealer in Ethiopia. Byron fought the Austrian Empire in the revolutionary Carbonari. Today's rebels just about manage a scuffle with the paparazzi.

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