Critics claim that anyone who writes rhyming verse "can never be a true poet". But surely, writes Felix Dennis, there is still place for a form that has been used by many of our greatest poets

I was a dunce at almost everything in school except English literature and cross-country running. Too small to bulldoze my way out of trouble on the rugby pitch and too idle to obtain approval through serious study, I learned that a smart mouth and a retentive memory were the best ways to escape the bullying of classmates or the wrath of masters. Poetry came early to my rescue. By chance, I had a kindly, enthusiastic English teacher, known to us as "Abdul" Rowe (on account of his long black beard and swarthy complexion), who took to lending me his heavily annotated poetry anthologies. By my mid-teens, I had devoured Donne, Herrick, Raleigh, Herbert and Shakespeare's sonnets ("almost certainly not written by a glove-maker's son from Warwickshire", Abdul opined airily) and was eagerly making my way through Blake, Tennyson, Byron, Shelley, Browning and Wordsworth. The real discoveries came shortly before my expulsion from school at 15, when the works of A E Housman, Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, W H Auden, Charlotte Mew and Emily Dickinson gripped me by the throat.

I was dazzled and utterly entranced. I also struggled with T S Eliot and Ezra Pound, but they left me mostly unmoved. Nor could I make too much of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets, even with an inexpertly rolled reefer in my hand. "Free verse" seemed to me then, as it does now, 40 years later, too slick, too facile, with insufficient craft and a great deal of deliberate obscurity masquerading as erudition. Far too often, late 20th-century poetry left me feeling that I had somehow missed the point.

Where was the melody? Where was the meter? Where was the musical complexity of form? Where was the rhyme? And where, oh where, was the meaning? I found I was unable to retain it in my memory. As the retention of crucial lines of verse is one of the great joys of poetry, I eventually did what most readers did - I simply stopped reading many "modern" poets and sought refuge in the great anthologies and "complete works" of traditionalist masters.

Some free verse is marvellous. Many lines from Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, Les Murray, Ted Hughes, James Fenton and Cathy Song are engraved in my memory. Their work has given me enormous pleasure. It is not so much the form or approach of free verse that I object to. It is more the arrogant demand from a section of the literary world that all contemporary poetry be written in that form, and that form exclusively.

I draw the line when modern critics and poets assert, loudly and very rudely, that anyone who writes today in traditional forms is a "philistine" and "can never be a true poet". This is precisely what happened to me recently in a long Wall Street Journal feature about my poetry. As if sonnets and sestinas, villanelles and ballad forms had somehow become the carriers of a ghastly plague; as if a rhyming couplet might bring down an elaborately constructed house of cards.

Surely, forms that have been with us and that have been used extensively by the greatest poets who ever wrote in English are among the glories of our civilisation, not lepers who must ring a bell to announce their presence. Tom Wolfe, the American novelist and critic, had this to say about the poems in my first collection, A Glass Half Full: "The unpredictable Felix Dennis, long known for publishing other things, now bursts forth as a 21st-century Kipling. In the poor old mallarme'd and ezrapounded world of contemporary poetry, no poet is taken seriously if he rollicks and rolls with rhyme, meter and melody . . . But the Kipling of Barrack-Room Ballads and 'The Recessional' could not be denied, at long last, despite decades of fashionable vituperation. Kipling II, I predict, will be just as much trouble - which he enjoys making on stage as well as on page."

The "fashionable vituperation" of free-versifiers exactly sums up the problem. And it takes an author of Wolfe's calibre to make himself heard above the din of booing and catcalls from the opposite camp. Surely, the vast cathedral of poetry in English is catholic enough to embrace any and all poetic forms? Disputes about form in the arts have raged since Iron Age man daubed ochre beauty on the walls of caves. But it is self-defeating to sneer at the vast majority of readers who enjoy traditional "rhyme, meter and melody" in poetry. There is a whiff of emperor's new clothes about it.

It cannot be a coincidence that A Glass Half Full, written in precisely those traditional forms, has been hugely successful both in the UK and the US among those who actually buy and read poetry for the enjoyment of it. God knows I am no great poet, but if the author of those "philistine" and "no true poet" brickbats had stood in the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon last year, or in Gotham Hall, New York City last month while actors from the Royal Shakespeare Society read my poetry to a packed and wildly approving house, he might perhaps have begun to reflect on one obvious fact: it is not the form of poetry that should concern us, but its power to move, to console and to inspire.

Felix Dennis's latest poetry collection, Lone Wolf, is out now from Hutchinson. His "Did I Mention the Free Wine?" tour starts on 11 October. For details, visit www.felixdennis.com

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