Apparently all poets do this…
1927: During a summer walk in Appletreewick, Yorkshire W.H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis came upon a dry-stone wall.
"A hundred yards from the wall, as if on a common impulse, we both began to walk faster: in fifty or sixty yards, we broke into a trot, and we were sprinting all out over the last thirty yards or so. Arriving simultaneously at the wall, we gave each other an amused but also sheepish look. I see now, beneath this absurdly trivial occurance, the glint of a mutual rivalry. but, if it did exist, it was natural enough at our age that it should; and we had a complementary repsect for eachother: it was at Appletreewick, I think, that we wrote down the names of all the living English peots we could remember: we then sorted them out into three columns: in the left column we put those whom we already excelled, middle column those we would excel one day, and in the right hand column (an extremely short one) the poets whom we had little hope of ever equalling.
from The Buried Day by C. Day Lewis (Chatto, 1960)
