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¡¡¡¡Poetry is dead. Well at least dying. The modern obsession with celebrity has finally knocked it from its perch(¸ßλ) and one of the great areas of literature is no longer loved or appreciated.

¡¡¡¡Such assumptions are all too easy to make¢Ÿalongside the easily-adopted position that poetry was once a great and loved art. The idea that 'lots' of people enjoyed it seems to form on its own and yet when you have to think about that heyday which is strangely hard to pin down¢Ÿthe image that comes to mind is of a person surprisingly upper-class¢Ÿnot the popular masses. When you really look into it¢Ÿpoetry is not really dying.

¡¡¡¡Poetry never really was that alive¢Ÿeven in its most traditional form. Roll through a few of the great names - Donne¢ŸShakespeare¢ŸByron¢ŸKeats...none of them were famous for their poetry in their own lifetime. Except possibly Shakespeare¢Ÿand even that£§s debatable. Byron¢Ÿfor example¢Ÿwas far more famous for committing incest with his cousin and then fleeing the country a couple of years later after he was warned he was to be tried for sodomy.

¡¡¡¡It could be bemoaned(±¯Ì¾) that the closest most people who don't now claim to enjoy poetry have ever come to it was being forced to read it in English lessons. In which the chance to appreciate it is¢Ÿshall we say¢Ÿstrangled at birth in many cases. The fact that most people who can name a poet today name Sylvia Plathi and Benjamin Zephaniah¢Ÿthe former famous for the current film about her and the latter for having turned down an OBE in the New Years Honours list¢Ÿcould be seen as depressing. Except that¢Ÿcompared to the past¢Ÿthe fact that one of those two is still alive and kicking and writing good poetry is a marked improvement. Keats had to die in a foreign country before anyone thought he was any good.

¡¡¡¡Ask someone who actually enjoys poetry and when not moping around in that classically poetic manner they can reel off at least three well-known poets writing today and happily still ticking.

¡¡¡¡The three I can think of are Paul Muldoon¢ŸSimon Armitage and Seamus Heaney. I concede that they're not exactly sprightly Simon Armitage being the youngest at 40. Incidentally¢Ÿhe is also one of the young men of poetry. Then again if you don't die young in poetry the chances are pretty slim that your best stuff will be written at an early age.

¡¡¡¡The question of whether poetry is under-appreciated is an easy one to answer. The more important question¢Ÿthough is has it ever really been appreciated©tPoetry can span the whole breadth of emotion from love to loathing. Yet possibly that's why it's treated with kid gloves on most occasions. Poetry has to make a harder push for acceptability because it's so damn difficult to understand half the time and because everyone fails to realise that actually not all poetry is good. In fact a fair proportion of it is awful and yet the "it's a great literary art" approach means that nobody dares to criticise it because they're not allowed to claim they understand it. Not that the great British institution of the literature class in most cases does much for poetry's health. It being regarded in the same vein as French¦ŸI don't understand and I don't want to and I'm happy it's over. Except it needn't be¡­

¡¡¡¡Poetry is great and it deserves better recognition in its classical form¢Ÿbut it has never been a popular art.

¡¡¡¡From Oxford University