LAST WEEK, MY COLLEAGUE ON THIS page wrote a piece about poetry and how it functions for her as a tonic for the soul. I feel this too, but recently had my own affection for poetry challenged by the poet Nick Laird, after a panel that I was on at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, when I talked about how much I loved Philip Larkin. Nick, himself also a novelist, said to me afterwards: “Novelists, they always love Larkin.” By which I think he was not being negative about Larkin, but was making a point about how many types of poetry there are.

Novelists love Larkin because he is a narrative poet: not narrative in the Victorian, Longfellow, telling-a-story-in-185-stanzas sense, but in that he tends to describe concrete experience, things that he has seen — a tourist poster for Prestatyn, some weddings from a train, the trees coming into leaf — and then alchemises that into something larger, into poetry. He is, in a sense, prosaic, partly in his subject matter, but also in that the points he makes could be conveyed in prose; they just happen to be conveyed much more majestically in his poetry.

There is, however, another type of poetry — a poetry whose greats, interestingly, are all American: William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens — where no one experience is described, or conceit outlined: rather the words brushstroke a mood, traverse ambiguities of meaning, and generally create an effect near to the condition of music, or maybe, following the American thought, the condition of abstract Expressionist art.

From a poet’s point of view, this kind of poetry is perhaps purer, in that its “message”, for want of a better word, is not distillable into prose: it can exist only as poetry. This type of poetry can be troubling for novelists, or people — such as Tom Cox, who also wrote a piece in last week’s Books about poetry, but about how he has never got it — who prefer to read novels, because, fundamentally, they don’t know what it means; which of course, they shouldn’t, as what the poet is trying to do is move beyond the convention of meaning.

However, I also think that for me liking Larkin, and poets of his school, may be something of a reaction against the type of poetry that I wrote bucketloads of during adolescence. Here’s one that made it to the school magazine, called Lipstick And Eye-Liner:

Melancholic,
Looked out of a window,
Thought “I hate mankind”
Realised “Misanthrope”
And laughed.
I almost broke all the windows in my house.

Bollocks, of course, but that’s what poetry as an adolescent is for: expressing all the bollocks in your soul. I have written poems as an adult, but I am slightly embarrassed about this — that’s one of the weird things about poetry, unless you’re a professional poet, even as a writer one is somewhat ashamed about it, forever tarnished by the shadow of sixth-form efforts. The way one gets round this embarrassment, I’ve noticed, is through versification. If I write poetry now, I try to write sonnets, as if formal technique cancels out immaturity, which it sort of does, as I’d never have bothered with all the pfaff of pentameters and “abba”s when I was 16.

Incidentally, Stephen Fry’s new book, The Ode Less Travelled, puts the case brilliantly for the employment of formal techniques in the writing of verse, demonstrating how forcing your poetic message into the discipline of rhythm and rhyme will create effects in and of themselves, whatever you are trying to say. My friend Peter Bradshaw, the film critic, once did this most effectively by writing a series of “serious” limericks, such as this one:

An Hiroshima victim called Raoul
Went stumbling around in a cowl
In this grim garb encased
He viewed carnage and waste
And felt misery and pain in his soul.

What’s brilliantly funny about this is that it uses only the brain’s established reaction to the particular tum-te-tum of limericks to create the classically comic juxtaposition of bleak and absurd — a juxtaposition which, in this case, is simply that between meaning and rhythm.

Anyway, my point is, that as you get older, perhaps one’s poetic tastes move away from “pure” poetry and towards prose poetry, or prosaic poetry: good solid stuff, basically, where you kind of know more or less what it’s about. This has certainly been the case for me, or it was, until a friend happened to show me this poem, on the website of a poet named Len Webster:

Late night TV is not generally for me.
The sight of Baddiel and Skinner on a set
Never rouses me to ecstasy
Or, at least, it hasn’t yet.

Yes. Now I think I might come back to believing that poetry should be diffuse, ambiguous and impossible for the average reader to understand.

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