Each year poets throughout the land wait breathlessly for the results of the National Poetry Competition and the latest winners’ anthology. We can gauge the state of our national literacy by these pages – which is why this year’s results left some of us spitting feathers. The first two prizes have been awarded not to poetry at all, but to prose, printed in central blocks on the page, evidently under the impression that this makes them something other than prose.

The top gong went to Imogen Wade for The Time I was Mugged in New York City. The second, from Fawzia Muradali Kane, entitled Eric, contains numerous illiteracies. Both read like diary entries, interesting as self-expression or reportage. But poetry?

Most mainstream publishers will now no longer touch poetry and warn versifiers off in their submissions guidelines

There is a simple litmus test to tell poetry from prose. Write the words out in a continuum like a newspaper article. You’ll soon spot the difference. Traditionally, poetry has been written in short lines on the page to alert the reader to a change of linguistic pace. It is not just prose broken up into smaller segments with a toffee hammer. Poetry is not prosaic.

The brains of our great poets produce brilliant crystallisations, and their work is written in those short lines to signal that theirs is not ordinary language but condensed and explosive, fusing multiple meanings. Ezra Pound used the German term for poetry – ‘Dichtung’ or ‘condensation’ – to describe it. Dramatic fusion is a key feature. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Of course, we use linguistic fusion outside of poetry in headlines and expletives. But poetry does it in excelsis. And because the words themselves are so powerful, meter and rhyme have been used as a way of controlling their radioactive energy.

T. S. Eliot felt that the poet’s brain was a crucible for alchemy, ‘storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together’. What was important was ‘the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place’.

The poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge devoted much of his literary life to exploring the creative process. He said the poet ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity… He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name Imagination.’ Such coalescent language is held under tension and bursts open as we read, with evocative power and resonance. This is the language of Coleridge’s imagination, his ‘coadunating faculty’ or ‘esemplastic power’.

Poetry is both exquisite and strong because it has deep connective tissue. It may deceive by simplicity, as George Herbert did, but the complexity is there underneath, beautiful as a mandala, vibrating in our brains.

This distinguishes it from doggerel such as one might read in birthday cards or the pleadings of adolescent love lyrics. The poet William Topaz McGonagall demonstrated with legendary aplomb what really bad poetry can look like. Crushing words together on the line like tinned fish, his work bumbles through metre that doesn’t scan, proclaiming self-important and trite observations as though they were of epic importance.

The language of real poetry must be more impactful and redolent than everyday prose. It contains a mix of meanings woven together with magic and mysticism:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
a stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea

Coleridge wrote that in a verse following an opium reverie he experienced. Poetry is likely to be affecting because the person who wrote it not only has a finely honed writing precision but a profound understanding of human emotions and the human condition. Since Langland, Chaucer and Shakespeare we have trusted poets to produce the kind of language that makes us sit up (Simon Armitage), or sob (Sylvia Plath), or experience profound gratitude for expressing something spiritual that we have been struggling to find words for (Alice Oswald). We see it and believe it. We may sigh with satisfaction or weep with relief.

But with the Poetry Society, surely the highest authority on the subject, we have reached the point where mere prose is poetry. All you do is set it out in the middle of the page, perhaps justified to make it look neat like a printer’s block, and shazam! What it actually says doesn’t seem to matter. At least it looks like that shortened stuff.

This a betrayal of those like myself who have loved and written and studied poetry for decades because it has a knock-on effect. Most mainstream publishers will now no longer touch poetry and warn versifiers off in their submissions guidelines. Most schools are dropping it from their curricula, because it has been so badly taught in the past that kids were forced to learn it by rote and wanted to stab the poet’s eyes out. In the Poetry in Primary Schools 2023 report published by Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and MacMillan and based on a survey of nearly 500 teachers, only 38 per cent felt confident about offering the subject. We need urgently to prevent this literary impoverishment.

Poetry that has long taught us empathy and sensitivity is being tossed on the cultural bonfire. The great bards are fading into geology like some lost civilisation nobody cares about. In terms of brain hemisphere bias we lurch sharply to the left, where rationality and logic preside, rather than imagination, vision and insight. God help us.