Military historian Ben Shepard has accused Britain’ s former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion of ripping off his work for a Remembrance Sunday poem.

According to Shephard, Motion used 17 passages from A War of Nerves in the poem, An Equal Voice which was printed in Sunday’s edition of The Guardian.

Says Shephard, “There is a word for this. It begins with ‘p’ and it isn’t poetry.”

“Ridiculous,” counters Motion who explicitly states in his poem’s introduction that lines from Shephard’s book were used.

Motion states the poem is a compilation in the tradition of “found poetry” that dates back to Shakespeare and that the accounts are drawn from a variety of sources. To this Shephard responds, “the ‘voices from a variety of sources’ were not ‘found’ by Motion, but by myself.”