Carol Rumens, the poet and Guardian columnist whose Poem of the week ran for nearly 20 years, has died aged 81. Within days of the announcement of her death, readers began writing in to pay tribute to a writer who, in the words of one correspondent, "made Mondays something to look forward to."

Rumens built that loyalty slowly and steadily. Her column, published weekly on the Guardian's books pages, developed a devoted readership over its two-decade run — an unusually long life for a regular newspaper feature about an art form often treated as marginal in mainstream journalism.

The tributes that arrived from readers focused on the qualities that made the column work. Foremost among them was clarity. Rumens wrote criticism that avoided the specialized vocabulary of the academy, a choice her readers noticed and valued.

"Carol was an excellent commentator on poetry, shrewd and deep-thinking but able to express her thoughts in plain English rather than academic jargon," wrote Sheenagh Pugh, writing from Shetland.

Pugh, herself a poet, went on to describe the editorial sensibility behind the column. "Her taste in poems was eclectic and very original; one didn't always share it, but it was never predictable or dull."

That last formulation — the admission of occasional disagreement combined with an acknowledgment of consistent interest — may be the most telling measure of what Rumens achieved. Columns that last twenty years rarely survive on unanimous approval; they survive because readers keep coming back even when they want to argue. Pugh's tribute suggests that Rumens's selections did exactly that, week after week.

The character of the column, as the readers' responses sketch it, rested on three pillars: plain language, intellectual seriousness, and unpredictability. Each of these qualities ran against a common failing of poetry criticism. Plain language pushed back against the jargon that can fence the art off from general readers. Shrewd, deep-thinking analysis resisted the opposite failure, the glib appreciation that treats every poem as beyond question. And an eclectic, original taste refused the safest editorial strategy of all — reprinting only the established canon of classroom favorites.

The timing of the tributes matters too. Readers responded within days of the news of Rumens's death, at the age of 81, and the Guardian opened its pages to their remembrances. A newspaper does not typically hand over space to reader letters about a columnist unless the columnist has earned a genuine relationship with the audience. The near-twenty-year run of Poem of the week created that relationship, one Monday at a time.

For the paper's readers, Mondays were the day the column appeared — hence the tribute that serves as the collective farewell: she made Mondays something to look forward to. It is a modest-sounding compliment, and a demanding one. Anyone who has faced a Monday knows how much sustained interest it takes to change the feel of the day.

What remains now is the archive. Nearly two decades of weekly columns — each one a poem, selected by an eclectic and original sensibility, followed by commentary in plain English — constitutes a substantial body of critical writing. Whether the Guardian continues the column, and in what form, will determine whether the Monday readership Rumens built has a future as well as a past.