Christie's, which is auctioning a stained and frayed copy in New York, said the book could set a record price for American literature. Poe wrote the poems, inspired by the work of Byron, as he tried to launch his literary career after moving from his childhood home in Virginia to Boston, the city of his birth. He had at the time been trying to distance himself from his foster father, John Allan, in Richmond, Virginia, with whom he had a difficult relationship.

The book was published in complete obscurity, paid for entirely by the author and printed by a man who normally produced flyers and labels. When he later re-published the poems under his own name, Poe apologised for their quality and said they had never been intended for publication. A copy of the original book did not surface until more than 25 years after it was published, prompting some poetry experts at the time to claim it had never existed.

From there it only got worse. Although he was at the time probably the most famous writer in America, his cousin Neilson Poe omitted to tell anyone he had died, and so fewer than 10 people turned up for the funeral. The priest couldn't be bothered to give a sermon, and the entire ceremony lasted three minutes.

This Sunday, 160 years almost to the day since his sorry passing, Poe will finally be given the send off that his multitude of fans passionately believe he deserved. At 11.30am, a life-size recreation of his body will be carried in a horse-drawn carriage from his Baltimore home in Amity Street, to the Westminster Burying Ground where not one, but two full-length ceremonies will be held in front of up to 700 admirers, some of whom will have travelled from as far away as Vietnam.

The ceremony is being held as part of a year-long series of events to mark the 200th year of Poe's birth. To the amusement of Poe experts, the double anniversary of the start and end of his life has led to an unseemly scramble between several US cities - notably Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston - to claim ownership of the writer. Organisers of the Baltimore funeral are playing their ace card, exclaiming: "We have the body!"

Sainsbury's teamed up with Naked Chef Jamie Oliver and Asda went with Sharon Osbourne, but in an attempt to brand itself as the literary punters' supermarket of choice, Morrisons has employed the services of three British poets to help get the people of Britain cooking. The unlikely collaboration, which the supermarket chain has dubbed the "food laureate", will see poets Ian McMillan, John Mole and Peter Sansom writing a series of poems about how to prepare different recipes. McMillan, a former poet in residence at Barnsley Football Club, has tackled the crumble. Mole, winner of an Eric Gregory award, has taken on batter – "What you're going to need for a dish that can't fail / Are a bowl, a deep fryer, flour and ale" – while Sansom has dreamed up verse about making a roast.

"Poets have always accepted shillings from patrons," said McMillan. "A lot of courtly poets were given financial backing by the king, and there's been a rise of poets in residence since the 80s. It's fine, as long as you don't write anything you're not happy with."

But more than 800 knitting enthusiasts are currently involved in knitting and crocheting individual letters to create the world's first giant knitted poem as part of the centenary celebrations for the Poetry Society, with the as-yet secret poem set to be unveiled at the beginning of October. Poetry Society director Judith Palmer said she had been inundated by knitters keen to get involved. "It hasn't been a matter of trying to persuade people to join in – we're just trying to manage the huge number who are calling up all the time," she said. "It's just spread and spread: there must be 90 knitting blogs writing about it around the world."

The level of interest in the project meant, she said, that she had considered doing a longer poem – The Prelude, or Paradise Lost – but she has so far stuck to her original choice, a mystery to all but a few people at the moment but likely to become less of a secret when the letters start to be sewn into words in September. "People are guessing all the time," said Palmer, a keen knitter herself. "They guess Yeats's He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven most often, and it is one I thought about doing." Her choice, though, is "not an obvious one", although she did admit that the poem had "a significance in the history of the Poetry Society".

Keats House in Hampstead has been restored to reflect its appearance during the poet's life and will display items such as the gold engagement ring he gave to his neighbour Fanny Brawne in 1820. Keats lived in the semi-detached house for two years before his tuberculosis drove him to the warmer climate of Rome, where he died aged 25 in 1821.

He composed the famous poem Ode to a Nightingale under a plum tree in the front garden. The Grade I listed property was deemed too "fusty" to serve as the set for a new film about Keats's romance with Miss Brawne, Bright Star, which was instead filmed at Hyde House in Luton. But producers visited Keats House to gain inspiration for props and took a copy of Miss Brawne's gold and almandine engagement ring.

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Analysis of traces of paint and scraps of wallpaper allowed staff to recreate the original appearance of each room in the house, with Keats's bedroom painted in pale pink. Staff have also reproduced the unappealing pattern of the curtains around the poet's four-poster bed which tormented him as he lay suffering from tuberculosis before leaving for Rome. His death mask is displayed in the corner of the bedroom.

Two portraits of Keats painted by his friend Joseph Severn and a gilt bust produced after his death by sculptor Patrick MacDowell are among an expanded collection of dozens of prints, drawings and objects that have never been seen by the public before.

Duffy had already made clear that she "didn't want to take on what basically is an honour on behalf of other poets and complicate it with money". "I thought it was better to give it back to poetry," she said in May, when she was chosen as laureate.

The prize, worth £5,000, will go to a UK poet working in any form – including poetry collections for adults and children, individual poems, radio poems, translations and verse dramas – who has made the "most exciting contribution" to poetry that year. "I'm delighted, with the assistance of Buckingham Palace and the Poetry Society, to be founding this new award for poetry. With the permission of Carol Hughes, the award is named in honour of Ted Hughes, poet laureate, and one of the greatest 20th-century poets for both children and adults," said Duffy in a statement announcing the new prize.

Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: "Everything's okay. Everything's like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything's okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place... Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points... The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again..." The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: "I didn't watch TV yesterday." And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled "Summer Sonnet." ("Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons' pencil case.") News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won’t be soaring anytime soon, and that "hot" is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who's to say these articles aren't factual?

Alongside these cute reports were gripping journalistic accounts. David Grossman, one of Israel's most famed novelists, spent a night at a children’s drug rehabilitation center in Jerusalem and wrote a cover page story about the tender exchanges between the patients, ending the article in the style of a celebrated author who’s treated like a prophet: "I lay in bed and thought wondrously how, amid the alienation and indifference of the harsh Israeli reality, such islands - stubborn little bubbles of care, tenderness and humanity - still exist." Grossman's pen transformed a run-of-the-mill feature into something epic.

John Sutherland, professor emeritus of modern English literature at University College London, called it an angry poem. "The motive force here is disgust. Disgust at the great machine and its dishonest mechanics who run our society. Duffy Furiosa. The poem's technique is that of someone almost speechless with rage - a great tumbling catalogue. No time for structure."

He said he rather regretted the fact that Duffy had given the poem a title "because it's not until close to the end that this great heap-of-crap which has so got Duffy's goat is identified."

Sutherland also wondered whether Duffy was shifting her attack from politics to politician - as in Gordon Brown - by using the "the talismanic phrase" of "moral compass".

Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, called it a bold poem. "I think that what she has managed to do is capture in poetry the sense of disbelief, the strangled despair, which leaves most of us just shaking our heads, open-mouthed and inarticulate." She said Duffy had brilliantly put into words that "bloody hell" feeling most people felt every time they listened to the latest detail of the expenses scandal.

Padel resigned on Monday after holding the Oxford post - the most important academic role in poetry in the UK - for just nine days, after it emerged that she had alerted journalists to Walcott's past. Walcott had withdrawn from the race earlier this month after some 200 Oxford academics were anonymously sent a package containing photocopied pages from the book detailing the allegations made against him, criticising the "low tactics", and the "low and degrading attempt at character assassination" the election had become.

Padel gave a press conference at the Guardian Hay festival yesterday, where she apologised to Walcott for what she described as "a grave error of judgement". "It was naive and silly of me – a bad error of judgement. I can of course see that people can misconstrue these two isolated emails of mine as part of a larger campaign I had nothing to do with," she said yesterday. "I do think I was very silly to send those emails but I was trying in a misguided way to address student concerns."

"I should like to thank the university and the people who voted for me," Ms. Padel said. "I feel honored and humbled to be given this responsibility and shall try to carry it out as well as I can. My backers based their support for me on what they felt I could offer poetry and students. Now I shall do my best to fulfill their trust." Ms. Padel's selection follows close on the heels of Carol Ann Duffy's appointment as Britain's poet laureate; that post had been held by male writers for 341 years.

The race for the 300-year-old post of Oxford poetry professor, the most important academic poetry position in the UK, is expected to be decided late this afternoon despite calls from a growing group of Oxford students and graduates, headed by the secretary of the Oxford University Poetry Society, for it to be suspended.

Oxford University graduates, who vote for their choice of professor, have been left with just two candidates to choose between – British poet Ruth Padel, the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and Indian poet and critic Arvind Mehrotra – following the withdrawal of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott at the start of this week.

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Oxford Poetry Society secretary Eloise Stonborough said that responses from students, graduates and fellows backing her call for the current candidates to withdraw and allow nominations to be reopened had been pouring in on Friday. She believes that unless the election is suspended, the "importance and dignity" of the professorship, held in the past by Matthew Arnold, Seamus Heaney and WH Auden, will be damaged.

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Even one of Padel's own nominators, philosophy professor AC Grayling, believes the election should be postponed, and wrote to his candidate asking her to withdraw in protest. "To win because anonymous and malicious persons witch-hunted Walcott out of the race would be a hollow and tainted thing," he wrote in a blog for the Guardian. "The election for professor of poetry at Oxford is about poetry, not morals. Plenty of poets in the past have behaved very badly in all sorts of ways, and far worse than Walcott is said to have done. Do we refuse to read them therefore? That is, do we silence their voices, exclude them, bar them, on the grounds that they did those things? No, we do not."

Three days after winning the presidential election, Barack Obama was spotted in Chicago carrying the 500-page volume of Derek Walcott's collected poems. You wonder if he would let himself be seen holding that book now. Earlier this week, Walcott felt compelled to withdraw from the race to replace Christopher Ricks as the £6,901-a-year Oxford Professor of Poetry, after what one of his backers described as an "insulting smear campaign".

Some 200 academics recently received a dossier detailing sexual harassment claims made against Walcott. The dossier included pages from a 1984 book, The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus by Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner, which details the sexual harassment claim made by a Harvard student against Walcott (upon which he has never commented). It also included a 1996 allegation made by Nicole Niemi, a Boston University student and member of Walcott's creative writing class. Niemi, now a writer using the name NM Kelby, sued Walcott for alleged sexual harassment and "offensive sexual physical contact", demanding $500,000. The case was reportedly settled out of court.