Philip Hensher: Young poets are often the best

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.

I very happily declare an interest here, since Kennard is studying for a PhD in creative writing at Exeter University, where I teach it. I know him well, though can't claim any contribution to his brilliantly stylish work. I would always have thought his work deserved every prize going. Still, merit and reward hardly ever coincide in this wicked world, and it's always thrilling to see a major talent emerging.

Over the years, the Forward prize has gone to poets at a much later stage in their careers. It's a very reliable measure of quality, but it definitely has an air of middle-aged distinction about it. Previous winners include David Harsent, Kathleen Jamie, Peter Porter, John Fuller and Carol Ann Duffy. That excellent poet, Jo Shapcott, who won it in 1999, was still thought of by many people as a brilliant young poet at the age of 46.

Which is rather odd, because youth has never been a bar to writing great poetry. Novelists tend to emerge after 30 – often later in the case of women – and move into their prime slowly, in their forties and fifties. Poets, on the other hand, often seem to emerge fully formed, with an immediate gift which, in some cases, they spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture.

"They can dash forward like Hussars," Auden said of his tribe, and he ought to have known: lovely and profound as his post-war work is, it never recaptures the electric power of his 1930s poetry, and his reputation rests on what he wrote in his twenties.

Even poets who one always thinks of as writing into old age turn out to have been prodigies. Much of Tennyson's most beautiful writing came quickly, in the early 1830s. Pope was writing dazzlingly at 16 – "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came," he wrote later. Milton's early verse has a magic quite separate from the verse of his august maturity.

And there are those who do everything in what starts to seem appallingly early youth. Rimbaud is the most famous example, writing perfect, classical French verse at 14, his oeuvre complete before he was 25. Dylan Thomas was effectively done as a poet long before his death. Wordsworth and Coleridge went on living and writing, but their writing rests on the poetry of the first half of their lives.

And 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 doesn'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.

That yields its own rewards. I love late Auden's chattiness, and actually prefer that beautiful last volume of Browning, Asolando, published on the day of his death, to his congested early style. But our current idea of poetry – electric with dense language and vivid coinages, and essentially lyric rather than discursive – does tend to favour the sort of poetry that, historically, young people are excited by. I wonder, therefore, why the Forward prize has tended to reward established reputations, good poets though they all are, when what we really prefer is the sort of verse which inventive young writers come up with quite naturally.

Well, they're difficult to find in a crowded market, I suppose, so full marks to the judges for noticing a really impressive talent in full flourish, and not telling Kennard to come back when he's got some grey hairs to show us. After all, they wouldn't have said that to Keats in his prime – would they?

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