"I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion, and--if he is lucky enough--know the love of an honest woman." Having thus enjoined the S.R.O. audience at his first of three fall lectures as Oxford's new Professor of Poetry, British Litterateur Robert Graves, 66, last week wound up the series with a final cautionary note to young ladies who dream of becoming an artist's inspiration: "Too many irresponsible young women, eager for muse-ship, go in search of poetic recognition. Unless they have the integrity, the ruthlessness, and the certified characteristics of a real muse, they will get entangled with pseudo poets. The outcome is always sad, often sordid. Cunning pseudo poets ruthlessly exploit a pseudo muse's innocent ambitions. The ancient Irish triad is as true today as ever it was:

It is death to mock a poet, Death to be a poet, Death to love a poet."

Hustling into Manhattan to accept the Heisman Trophy, Ernie Davis, 22, the first Negro ever to be chosen as football's ''outstanding college player," got his hand shaken by President Kennedy, was gang-tackled by emissaries of a Canadian pro team and both U.S. professional leagues, each of which has made him its top draft choice. By opting for the National Football League, the thumping Syracuse University halfback could probably share with Michigan State's Ron Hatcher the distinction of being the first of their race to play for the Washington Redskins. But for Ernie this was at best a side issue. Grumped he: "I wish they would quit bringing up this race stuff. I don't want to be another Jackie Robinson. I just want to go where I can get the best offer."

In a not so oblique bid for more bucks to spend on nonnuclear bangs, Marine Corps Commandant David M. Shoup, 56, reminded the American Ordnance Association that even in the age of the H-bomb, a man with a rifle has unique utility. "An H-bomb," noted the bespectacled Medal of Honor winner, "cannot defend a base. An H-bomb cannot control or restore order where it lands. An H-bomb can only destroy."

"Biography of a Bookie Joint"--a CBS-TV documentary uncovering local cops on the take--cast a dark cloud over the annual Boston Police Ball until Richard Cardinal Gushing, 66, dropped around with an evening-saving message. "In my theology," proclaimed Boston's homegrown Roman Catholic archbishop, "gambling in itself is not a sin . . . It's the abuse that makes gambling evil. We all have our faults. But why hang them, as it were, like dirty linen on a clothesline from one end of the country to the other? Someone betrayed us . . ." But, though it earned lusty cheers from the ballgoers at the Boston Garden, Cardinal Cushing's apologia won him no points with local Protestant clergymen, one of whom tartly noted that while bookmaking "may not be a sin, it happens to be a crime."

Hamilton Fish, 73, sometime Harvard All-America ('08-'09) and congressional America Firster (1919-45), now retired to writing letters to the editors, shot his latest off to the New York Herald Tribune on the subject of this season's Yale-Harvard gridiron amateur hour. According to the Trib (and other papers), the Yale and Harvard benches had piled wildly into a fourth-quarter donnybrook that disfigured the most ivy-covered of Ivy League games; but larruping ex-Lineman Fish righteously insisted that "not a single Harvard substitute joined in the fray--though they had every provocation." As for the part played by the bumbling Bulldogs (loser by 27-0) in "the most disgraceful act I have ever witnessed during 50 years' association with football," the old Walter Camp follower mourned for the pristine past 40 falls ago when Yale Captain Malcolm Aldrich "reportedly told his team, 'The Harvard captain will play with his ankle strapped up; if any member of the team deliberately adds to his injury this afternoon, I shall see to it personally that he leaves the game at once.' "

Halfway round the globe from Queen Elizabeth's triumphant tour of West Africa (see THE WORLD), her 24-year-old cousin, Princess Alexandra, was wowing the Far East. After shattering pomp and protocol from Tokyo to Rangoon with gay, irresistible insouciance, the handsome kid sister of the Duke of Kent donned a split-bamboo chapeau to safari into the northern Burmese jungle, left the drum-beating local tribesmen as smitten as the London tabloids, which have dubbed her "Alexandra the Great."

News that Pushinka, the Cosmomutt-descended mongrel that Nikita Khrushchev sent Caroline Kennedy last June, had been awarded District of Columbia dog license No. 9 sent rank-conscious Washington scurrying to check the rest of the canine protocol list. License No. 1, it turned out, had been collared by Caroline's spirited Welsh terrier. Charlie, and Lyndon Baines Johnson's Little Beagle Johnson had usurped the No. 2 once proudly sported by a cocker named Checkers. As for the remaining one-digit dog tags, some had long since been pre-empted by the city's permanent, nonpartisan population. Among them: Nos. 3 and 4, owned by cairn terriers G-Boy and Tucker, the best friends of J. Edgar Hoover.

Still smarting at Labor howls over a classified paper on Britain's Common Market negotiations that fell into U.S. hands, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan revealed himself as a man with scant faith in either open covenants or closed yaps. Diplomatic dealings, he complained, were not made easier "if the final price, by leaking, becomes automatically the opening bid. But then, of course, everything does leak. Gentlemen prefer blondes and diplomats always leak. Politicians are the same. And their wives. I must be careful."

From her forthcoming book on the most vexing associates of her 74 years ("Once famous, one is subjected to nothing but insults"), Dame Edith Sitwell, grande dame of Britain's most imposing and impossible literary family, leaked the first bit of spleen: that D. H. Lawrence would be among her major targets for setting his Lady Chatterley's Lover at the Sitwell estate in Derbyshire and modeling the novel's war-maimed, cuckolded baronet after the elder of her brothers, Sir Osbert. "My brother," noted the Plantagenet-descended poetess, "is a baronet, and he fought like a tiger for his country in the First World War. I don't know why Lawrence should have done this to Osbert, who never harmed him in any way."

While his father-in-law, William E. Stevenson, 61, a longtime president of Oberlin College, was slated for the prestigious, $27,500-a-year ambassadorship to the Philippines, New Jersey's lame-duck Democratic Governor Robert Meyner, 53, was headed for New Frontier oblivion. Unsummoned to Washington despite the attempts of top New Jersey Democrats to land him a job with the Administration, the former Phillipsburg lawyer--who took a fatal hesitation step before jumping on the 1960 Kennedy bandwagon--announced that he would be returning to private practice. As Meyner himself once confided, "The Irish Mafia doesn't like me."

From a man who saw Brahms plain and studied under Cesar Franck came a dirge for modern music. Asked by a London newsman which 20th century composers seemed likely to stand the test of time. Paris-born Maestro Pierre Monteux, 86, flatly replied: ''I don't see any, except perhaps Stravinsky." In a tart catalogue of inadequacies, the peppery new conductor of the London Symphony went on: "Mahler, he won't live; he's an imitator. Prokofiev, I don't think so. Shostakovich, no. Hindemith, no inspiration. Bartok: I give him ten years."

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