I wish I could convey in particular to young people, whose mental appetites seem whetted so easily these days by the transitory and the trashy, the quiet depths, the delights, the leaping excitements of great poetry. Perhaps I should remind the young inclined to scoff, that Bob Marley became an 
icon at least partly because his best songs have the beauty and enduing significance of good poetry. And I hope lovers of popular music are aware that Frank Sinatra in his famous song ‘I Did It My Way’ only borrowed from the poet Walt Whitman who wrote it long ago: “Unstopp’d and unwrap’d by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely my own way and put unerringly on record – the value thereof to be decided by time.”
Of all the poets I read when I was young Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the one I loved best. In the sixth form at school there were five of us who knew ‘Kubla Khan’ by heart and one of us only had to begin and the
