Stephen Wade: ‘Early man and woman must have known literary rejection. Violence, aggression and downright open attacks are not uncommon and they are certainly not new. Today the poet is able to supply a retort to the editor by e-mail, writing ‘You know diddly-squit about good writing, you penny ha’penny hack.’ ‘

Stephen Wade: ‘I have been, over the last thirty years or so a Russian-Yorkshire poet, an aesthetic Wildean, a Nervalian flaneur inhabiting literary cafes, a stand-up embarrassment purveying Yorkshire dialect verse, and a writer walking the wings in prisons. All this activity springs from my love of the spoken word. I put it all down to hearing the great Irish poet W B Yeats, who ill-advisedly recorded his poem on some kind of early His Master’s Voice disc, chanting “I will arise and go now…” in a tone somewhere between a guy eager for the loo and a vicar giving a sermon on a cold Sunday in Upper Swagdale.’

Stephen Wade: ‘As time pressed on and publishing became established as a money-making notion, writers became a nuisance. Basically, there were too many of them. Most failed scribblers could be picked out in society by their flat noses, caused by the door slamming them against the wall as they loitered outside a patron’s door. With literary failure came its trappings and side-effects: most affected areas of the body were the bottom (writers’ bottom’ entered the medical vocabulary in the nineteenth century); the pen-pusher’s palsy (affecting the cheek, which twitches after too much false smiling at agents) and most deadly of all, depression of course, brought on by rejection, and known as the ‘sighing sickness.’ This was caused by too much automatic sighing through boredom and misery.’