Why poetry will never leave us

The transition having been accomplished, poetry will go back to the background. But it won't go away entirely. Britain doesn't officially celebrate Shakespeare's birthday, but it does, continually, celebrate Shakespeare's language, the English language. It's just that the continuous celebration is very quiet, with a toot on a cardboard trumpet, the tweet of a penny whistle, and a tap on a tin drum.

I heard one of these yesterday, on a marvellous website called Poetry Archive, a creation for which Andrew Motion was partly responsible. On Poetry Archive you can hear the famous poets read out what they wrote. One of the poets is Richard Wilbur, the American poet who helped, fifty years ago, to do for me what Fanthorpe did for Duffy - provide an example. The Wilbur phrase that caught me this time, and took me back to when I was first under his spell, came from a little poem about mayflies. He visualises millions of them rising and sinking in the light, and he calls them "the tiny pistons of a bright machine".

I was knocked out, and I couldn't imagine anyone hearing that and not wanting to know more about Richard Wilbur. When they look him up, they will find that he was a soldier throughout the last campaigns of WWII from Cassino onwards, but when he came back from the slaughterhouse he hardly ever wrote about it. He preferred to write about mayflies. It's a reminder that it isn't the poet's job to keep in step with events. It isn't even the laureate's job.