Young poets are often the best ; ARTS & BOOKS REVIEW 1ST Edition

• Published in: Independent (London, England : 1986)
• Main Author: Hensher, Philip
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 20.07.2007
• Subjects: Kennard, Luke
• ISSN: 0951-9467

Byron said, after the publication of the first cantos of Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage in 1812, that he woke and found himself famous. The audience for poetry is not what it was in the Regency, but Luke Kennard would still have had a little taste of that when he woke on Tuesday morning to find himself on the shortlist for the Forward poetry prize for his collection, The Harbour Beyond the Movie. The Forward is the most admired and important of British poetry prizes, and Kennard, at 26, is the youngest poet ever to have been shortlisted. That's not including the poets whose careers were cut short by death. The second generation of the Romantics, Shelley and Keats, died horribly young, at the height of their powers. When a newspaper remarks how very young Kennard is to be shortlisted for a major prize like this, it does-n't take away from his achievement to point out that he is two years older than Byron on that abrupt morning of fame. Still more terrifyingly, when Keats was his age, his life's work was over and done with that last awkward bow. There are even more alarming examples - Chatterton, for instance - to suggest that Philip Larkin, who wrote almost no poetry in his last decade, was right when he said that poetry was a young man's game. That's not completely true: in our own age, Ted Hughes's magnificent late flowering in Birthday Letters and the translations disproves that immediately. What can be said is that the poetry of old age does tend to be more relaxed, more discursive, with a lower lyric pressure.