They could not be more different. Simon Armitage has a reputation for naturalistic, free-flowing poetry using modern language. He has translated Homer and is a Radio 4 regular. Felix Dennis, a magazine tycoon turned poet, writes verse that rhymes and follows centuries-old forms — something that infuriates poetry’s great and good. The feeling is mutual: Dennis believes that modernist verse has lost its way.

So what do they think of each other’s work? Weekend Review asked them to give each other a critical assessment.

Felix Dennis was born in 1947. He built a billion-dollar publishing business before turning to poetry after a serious illness in 1999. His verse is straightforward. Many pieces have helpful footnotes and say where they were written — Dennis has houses in Warwickshire, Connecticut and Mustique. His first collection, A Glass Half Full (2002), sold out its initial run of 10,000, helped by a reading tour with free wine. The poems reviewed here come from Lone Wolf, published last week.

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in Huddersfield. He has published nine volumes of poetry, including The Universal Home Doctor (2002) from which the poems reviewed come. He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004). His dramatisation of The Odyssey was broadcast on Radio 4 this year and he is translating the 14th-century narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Haunted
by Felix Dennis

When I was but a child,
The dark was full of dread,
I trembled then as monsters filed
To loom beside my bed.

The shadows on the wall
Hid creeping, crawling eyes,
The curtain ghost was six foot tall,
The wardrobe full of sighs.

Yet grown to man’s estate,
My cupboards full of tears,
Awake at nights I know the weight
Of wasted, selfish years.

And ogres on the stairs
Must blush at what they built,
Or wet themselves on angry chairs
By mirrors filled with guilt.

(Mustique)

The Shout
By Simon Armitage

We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face

I don’t remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park — I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the lookout post of Fretwell’s Farm —
I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy