Poetry? You get the message - or rather, you're acutely aware there is one, but who's talking and who's listening? The answer was: a tradition identified and defended, in which that message was cast. Scottish literature, for example. That's where I'll start. But I won't stop there, because I haven't lived in Scotland since 1988, because most of the work that marked me then was as foreign as I am now, because English lit is no longer a threat, because this overextended language is fit to burst, because every language is an epic, a beautiful stranger that few poets have measured up to, and because so many people are on the move; the message is moving with them.

In these pages I have tried to get to that message through philosophy and history, morphology and phonetics, much as a gorilla throws away the bananas so it can eat the tree. My conclusion, though banal enough, is essential for poets and readers working in isolation: the message doesn't live in a literary tradition but in a language among other languages, the idiolect of the poet which the poet discovers and the reader learns.

In working towards that conclusion, this reader has learned a thing or two - for example, that Ouspensky was right to say that intellectual effort accumulates energy whereas imaginative effort dissipates it; that TS Eliot in establishing the model of the career poet did immense harm to poetry; that WS Graham was the man indeed to say "do not expect applause", and that poets and their readers everywhere are quietly getting on with it. I hope there is something in this book for them.