It is obvious the young and beautiful are favoured in our times and the growing numbers of the old are a problem, encouraged to work but with an unspoken assumption that what they have to offer is of inferior value. But why should it be so in the arts and literature, where the products of age have traditionally proved to be a positive contribution?

How many literary prizes are there for the under-thirties or similar? Yet I have not come across any for the products of age. One of my previous publishers is on record as saying of the publicity photograph of a well-known author that she “could never publish a book by someone looking like that”. He was, of course, oldish and not beautiful. And I recall one poetry reviewer, a friend, castigating me privately even for writing about age.

Yes, physical frailty precludes much. But in the world of the imagination it can offer more than it takes away. William Blake described himself before his death in 1827 as “an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life, not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays”. The decaying body might affect stamina but has no other influence on artistic product.

Blake was then nearly 70, an age we could now easily boast “life begins” at, much as we used to argue life began at 40. What is our expectation of these modern long-livers? Is it only to set them up to be armchair-soporific, with a free TV licence? To keep them cosy and out of sight? It seems to me just as likely that a talent may emerge at the age of, say, 60 — with experience behind it — as at 20.

Yeats speculated that everyone “has one myth…which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought”. (He was referring to Shakespeare.) It is cruel to amputate the later part of life from expression through a silencing prejudice. Artists themselves can be defeatist and support the prejudice. Martin Amis claimed recently at a literature festival that “all” writers “go off” in age. Yet to complete the cycle of work at the end of life — his or her “myth” — should be an artist’s aim; and a poet, artist or musician who does not achieve anything especially marvellous in their latter years perhaps wasn’t so certainly in the first rank earlier. Prominent examples of late achievement are Rembrandt, with his penetrating self-portraits, Titian, who in old age painted virgins with a love more sensuous than many young men could achieve, the older Michelangelo, and Beethoven in his late quartets. Thomas Hardy was thrust from disappointment at his “failed” novels into writing poems that surpassed everything he had written before, and WB Yeats would be remembered as a minor poet were it not for his later work.

These works show not just a stupendous development but a quantum leap on the verge of age, as if they had crossed over and experienced in a short time a transformation of the spirit through a lifetime’s experience of their craft.

Yet we persist in looking for the “cutting edge” rather than the wise. Because of it, writers and artists at mid-stretch grow coy about mentioning their age. People still assert that “poets die young”, even though it is clearly nonsense. Of course, many were cut off too soon (as were many who were potentially great in all fields): Keats, Dylan Thomas, Shelley, Chatterton, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen. Maybe it is true that the “gods choose first those whom they love best” — but how well would they have survived my test?

For one can soon add up those who didn’t. How difficult it is to achieve that final glory is shown by the low success rate. One great poet, William Wordsworth, turned into an unreadable bore as he wheeled the remnants of his muse figure, his sister Dorothy, in a bath chair up and down a terrace in the Lake District. (He was an exception to my general thesis, because his poetry followed a disastrous social course.) Philip Larkin complained that “poetry has given up on me”.

Older artists often give up from weariness, or from feeling deserted, and settle for pensions and royalties if they have them. Some, like Hemingway or John Fowles, batter with preposterous late ambitions at the windows of the infinite, like ignorant flies against a window pane. Job-like, they have achieved all that their ambition desired and yet have nothing; the muse deserted them, or they did not deserve, or prepare for, the later muse.

I do not think it coincidental that a lack of interest in the creativity of the old comes at a time of equivalent scorn of spirituality. I can hear the word “spiritual” dropping like a stone in a dark well, dear reader. But do not confuse it with religious attendance. In our century, thrown into intellectual freedoms (and loneliness) unknown before, the spiritual might find its home more easily in the free and lonely range of what Blake called the “divine” imagination — in art that comes from the experience and wisdom of age.

Publishers — especially of poetry — and gallery directors, as well as writers and artists, should endeavour to pierce that screen of prejudice, which, from experience, is directly linked with our sceptical lack of expectations. As in all great and previous societies, while our hope is in the young, our primary expectation should be of the old s

Glyn Hughes’s autobiographical poem, Life Class (Shoestring Press, £13.95), is available at the Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £12.55, including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585

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