Poet feeding rats to damsel in distress (9)
I believe the answer is:
masefield
'poet' is the definition.
(I've seen this before)
'feeding rats to damsel in distress' is the wordplay.
I cannot quite see how this works, but
'rats' could be 'fie' (exclamation of disgust or outrage) and 'fie' is located in the answer.
an anagram of 'damsel' is 'maseld' which is located in the left over letters.
This accounts for all the letters.
This may be the basis of clue (or it may be nonsense).
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for masefield that I've seen before include "lyricist" , "Sea-Fever poet" , "poet laureate" .)