Spectator competition winners: Henry James and other well-known writers look for love online

In Competition No. 3302, you were invited to compose a dating app profile for a writer of your choice.

To mark the centenary last year of Philip Larkin’s birth, the poet Imtiaz Dharker wrote ‘Swiping left on Larkin’ in which she imagined how, given his complicated relationship with intimacy, the poet would present himself on such an app. This led me to wonder how other writers might set themselves apart in the online dating scrum.

A shout-out to Paul A. Freeman’s Kipling (‘If you can eat steak rare when all about you/ Are ordering their sirloins darkly singed…’)’ and Max Ross’s Wordsworth (‘Sadly I wander lonely as a cloud/ And so I seek some kind companionship…’). Nick MacKinnon, Sue Pickard, Paul D. Amer and Philip Roe also caught my eye, but the winners earn £30.

That affairs of the heart may call on wellsprings of spontaneous emotion is not to be doubted. Ardour has its place. Yet how incautious we are if we jump at the promptings of what may well be an ignis fatuus – that is, a strong but ephemeral attraction, one might even say a gamble – such as the social mix inevitably throws up. Thus why not submit myself to the indelicacy of a catalogued auction mart, so to speak, where the appraisal of personality can be studious and distant?

Friends whisper that risk can never be eliminated even by a ‘dating culture’ with its own lexicon of protective codes. Forthrightness demands the admission that it can reduce jeopardy, with the added commendation that it promises to be of paramount service to the single gentleman fatigued by the orthodox round of visits and occasions who wishes to ‘hook up’ with kindred souls.

Basil Ransome-Davies/Henry James

Heaven-bent, I yearned to be alone,
Sole-minded, and in my passion all-obsessed –
In prayer and honest toil my soul was blest!
Yet now my yen for solitude has flown.