WH AUDEN once said that it was the responsibility of poets “to defend the language against corruption” because “when it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear.” 

This has been true for a long time of the language of popular culture. Adverts that use words like “free,” “new” and “exciting” mean nothing at all. 

When politicians talk about “freedom,” “democracy” and “choice” we know they almost certainly mean the opposite. 

All the more reason therefore why we should expect the world of poetry to be a bit more careful in its use of language. 

When the Poetry Book Society (PBS) recently announced the “Next Generation Poets 2014” it was with the usual fanfare of self-congratulation and wild applause. After all, the 20 poets involved in this promotion are the “most exciting new poets from the UK [sic] and Ireland.” 

Of course, in the contemporary poetry world every “new thing” is a source of salivating wonder and empty superlatives — “doing something new,” “tackling fresh subject matter,” “emotional and literary risks,” “particularly fearless,” “reinvigorating the poetry scene” and so on, ad nauseam.

But there is something else going on here. According to the PBS, not only are these poets “expected to dominate the poetry landscape of the coming decade,” they will be “leading our national cultural conversation for many years to come.” Really? Who says?

This is the language of show business and big business, not poetry. Perhaps with this kind of PR machinery behind them, some of these young poets may dominate the review columns of the broadsheets for a while. But simply asserting that something is good does not make it so. Promise is not the same as achievement. 

Jeremy Robson (pictured) knows a thing or two about the promise of youth, having just emerged from what might be called the longest writer’s block in history. 

He was a key figure in the poetry-reading scene of the 1960s and 1970s, publishing several collections of poems and editing various anthologies, including The Young British Poets and he was for some years the poetry critic of Tribune. 

He started Poetry and Jazz in Concert and went on a reading tour of Israel with Dannie Abse, Ted Hughes, DJ Enright and Peter Porter. 

Blues in the Park (Smokestack, £12.95) is his first book of poems for over 40 years. It is a monument to patient skill and gentle craft, a celebration of the old-fashioned Horatian virtues of friendship, family and hearth. As you might expect, it is primarily a book about changing natural and human landscapes, about time, memory and loss. This is from the title poem, about a bandstand on Hampstead Heath: 

“the failing sun, the ghosts/of darkening evenings creeping in/that halts the step, not the steady drip/of leaves from widowed trees, great/oaks felled, the rows of shattered/flowers gunned down by feckless winds ... a season gone, a/season lost with all its rainbow colours ... the dwindling cast at/family celebrations, grave occasions,/houses boarded up, their owners gone/moved permanently on, letters/Returned to Sender. The litany of loss./Grief always just a phone call away.”

Robson writes with a beautiful autumnal melancholy, a bit like Proust writing in the Grand Hotel in Cabourg:

“In the empty/dining room a lonely pianist plays a/Strauss waltz, keeping his own time./An elderly couple, formally dressed, edge/gingerly towards closed veranda doors./Outside, a fiery sea spray, flung by the/wind, coats the windows of empty cafes … /I love it here for what it is, and was,/the tang of the giant waves, the voices in the air,/the departed cast somehow still there.”

And among the many ghosts at his shoulder is the fading voice of the certain and opinionated young poet he once was:  

“I had opinions then on/many things, strongly felt, or/so I thought, and springing hotly/from the tongue, unsought./But whose they were, and what the cost/and why they meant so much/is long since lost./I’d like to think that sure/but fading voice that now/sounds fake belonged to/someone else, a someone/on the make. But I can’t/discard it quite, not yet,/though many of the ‘wrongs’/I railed about seem right,/and many ‘rights’ scream wrong ...”