In Ewart's Collected Poems: 1980-1990, we find the following piece of light verse (Google Book Search snippet view):
The Beginning of an Ode on Who's Who
I'm terribly excited—And the MacBeth footnote? (The Scottish poet, not the play.) I've pieced it back together, in toto:
I have been invited
to join that great bunch of nonentities
who have the inflated identities,
such as Lord Leatherhead and Viscount Foxford
(who knew all the right—or were they the wrong?—
people at Oxford),
metallurgists, musicians,
phenomenologists, physicians
(and almost anyone in Debrett is
sure to be in with the celebrities—
but it's not so common for the neglected scribbler
to get into this exclusive club before he's senile
or a dribbler);
though there you might someday find it,
when you were halt, lame and blinded,
your name—is it really a good dropping one?
Though once one's in there's no stopping one,
one can drawl, like MacBeth★, 'Oh course I'm in Who's Who now,'
one's poetic specific gravity is certainly multiplied
by more than two now!
I'll be there with the great ones,
the truly honoured-by-the-State ones,
in that Never-Never-Land fathers
never reached (though both my grandfathers),
with conservative academics, donnish and prudish;
among the old women of both sexes my name may seem
a tiny bit rudish?
But the military, the Naval, the flying
(who don't mind people dying),
the Earls and the epistemologists,
the dentists, divines and Catholic apologists,
those who in stately homes discuss a cru or a crumpet,
though they won't like it at all, I'm sure, will just
have to lump it![pp. 118-119]
I am particularly fond of the sequence "Pinter Pitter Porter," which I think transforms the footnote into a sort of list poem, and makes it an integral part of Ewart's ode.
Reed seems to have become equally disenchanted with his appearance in Who's Who: he was first added to the rolls as early as 1952, but his 1977 entry contains his personal revisions to his bio and publications.
