The poetry revival I am talking about is not the general name given to a loose movement in Britain that took place in the 1960’s and 70’s. This was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement’s more conservative approach to British poetry. I am talking about the revival in the increased purchase of poetry books – anthologies and works by individual poets – in the new and secondhand book markets.

Where were you when JF Kennedy was shot? Where were you when John Lennon suffered the same fate? Where were you when Elvis Presley died? I bet 99 out of 100 people who were alive at the time of these events can tell you exactly where they were.

Where were you when the famous American poetess Sylvia Plath gassed herself in her London kitchen at the age of 30 during the harsh winter of 1963? I can bet not even 1 in a 100 could tell you. The same numbers probably have never heard of Sylvia Plath. However, all that could change.

The Internet allows the discussion and publication of poetry in a way previously impossible considering the uneconomic nature of the physical publishing poetry and publishing critiques, both amateur and academic.

The brash and materialistic eighties preceded the fantastic and terrified nineties. Now here we are well past the first decade of the 21st century, more sober and reflective, wondering where the world is going.

Out of this a generation is emerging a present-day version of the 60’s and 70’s dreamers and idealists. They want more than self-help books, more than herbal remedies and fatuous fantasies. There is a return to serious intellectual examination and spiritual actualisation.

And by serious I don’t mean lacking in humour. I’m talking about intellectual acuity (take the works of travel poet Bill Bryson for instance) compared to idiotic ramblings (say the books of creative conspiracy theorist David Icke). Bryson is funny and perceptive while Icke is obtuse and laughable. There’s a big difference.  We are moving away from weak thoughts to profundity.

Can there be any explanation other than this when a 17-year-old youth enters a bookshop asking for The Complete Works of Byron, or when a blonde girl no older than 15 says she is searching for the poems of Shelley?

In a decade of book-selling this has never happened before. Suddenly book shops are buying poetry books again to meet demand, and retrieving the slim poetry books once relegated to boxes in the basement, to create a special poetry section.

This makes sense of the revival of interest in the sixties ballad-poets: Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez. Once again Bob Dylan is speaking to the contemporary generation. T.S. Eliot and Ted Hughes are being discussed again. The demand for the work of Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran can barely be met. Dylan Thomas is revisited. There is renewed interest in the war poets and so-called world poetry: the Senegalese, Thai, French and Swedish poets.

And why not? It is possible because the books are available and affordable, thanks to the international online book-buying market and the renewed interest in poetic thought.

I belong to the Cayman Writer’s Circle and we meet most weeks. Most of us are poets. One prominent member is of the “old school” poets – “poems that actually rhyme!” The rest of us poets write less and none of it doesn’t rhyme but has much deeper meaning. Our Editor-in-Chief (he is the sole non poet member) produced a blank piece of paper one day and wrote a play about us all discussing the sheet of nothing and saying how clever it was and evoking much thought into what the ‘poet’ who had actually written nothing was thinking. It was funny. Having said that our editor has now admitted he now appreciates this “non rhyming” poetry. I have discovered more and more people taking up their pens and writing poetry which in turn encourages us all would be poets to read more of it.

Can a rediscovery of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” be far off? Hoard any old poetry books and poetry anthologies you still have. You could catch your children reading them one day and even writing it (like me).