Most of us were taught English poetry in school but only of a certain kind: the poetry of the educated classes. There was another kind of poetry: you could call it the poetry of the people. I remember only one example of this poetry in our schoolbooks -- The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens.

The poetry of the people survived mainly in songs and ballads -- Barbara Allen is an obvious example. It is one of the oldest songs in the English language. Many other songs and poems were lost because they weren't written down. If they survive at all, it is only in single verses.

What all the people's poetry has in common is its simplicity and directness. You could say that it is close to the bone. The best of it is found in the ballads of Scotland. Here is an example: Oft did I ride through Stirling Town, in the wind both and the wet.

Here is another example: Clerk Saunders and May Margaret walked o'er yon garden green. And deep and heavy was the love that fell the two between.

Piers Plowman was the last long poem written in the people's language. Much of this popular poetry was written in dialect and would hardly have survived the spread of conventional English. Thomas Hardy was undecided whether to write his novels and his poems in the Dorset dialect, which was his native language. Fortunately for him and us he wrote in conventional English. His old schoolmaster, William Barnes, wrote in that dialect -- all but a few of his poems are forgotten.

Forgotten

John Keats wrote a brilliant poem called The Ode to Autumn but it isn't the autumn that we know in these islands -- you could be somewhere in Southern Europe. Here is our autumn in the language of AE Coppard, that brilliant but forgotten writer of short stories: Autumn was advancing, and the apples were down, the bracken dying, the furze out of bloom, and the farm on the moor looked more and more lonely, and most cold . . .

And we recall a fragment from DH Lawrence that is also about autumn, more or less: The hedges were bare now showing the birds' nests no longer worth the hiding.

Edward Thomas didn't think of himself as a nature poet but such was his love of the English countryside and the plain people that he goes as close to reality as the poetry you will find in the early ballads. In one of his more famous poems, The Owl, his genius is economically captured:

And salted was my food and my repose, salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice,

Speaking for all who lay under the stars, soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

Then we recall a passage from his poem called A Private:

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors many a frosty night and merrily answered staid drinkers,

Good bedmen and all bores: 'At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush' said he 'I slept' . . .

And where now at last he sleeps more sound in France -- that too he secret keeps.

Nobody was better acquainted with the main body of English poetry than Patrick Kavanagh but he wasn't unduly influenced by it. He went his own way. Much of his poetry shows the mark of Monaghan's grey soil. Francis Ledwidge was his near neighbour but there is a marked difference between them. The reason is clear: Meath and Monaghan are almost different worlds.

Monaghan is a land of little hills and thin soil. Meath is a land of rich soil and great trees. Those factors make Kavanagh at times almost harsh, whereas Ledwidge remained a romantic, although he had a much harder life. Ledwidge was a poet of magic fragments:

I feel that she will come in blue,

With yellow on her hair, and two curls strayed

Out of her comb's loose stocks . . .

And, of course, we see Ledwidge at his most romantic in the oft-quoted passage:

Ay soon the swallows will be flying south, the winds wheel north to gather in the snow.

Even the roses spilt on youth's red mouth will soon blow down the road all roses go.

Kavanagh and Ledwidge were poets in their different ways. They remind us of DH Lawrence: A man is about as free as a tree that has its roots deep in the earth.

Much of today's good poetry is in the form of song. Eric Bogle's The Green Fields of France and The Band Played Waltzing Matilda are examples. The latter spells out in grim detail the horrors of warfare as experienced in the Battle of Gallipoli. Incidentally, Francis Ledwidge experienced those horrors at their very worst but he was never bitter.

Of course, for the last two generations we have Woody Guthrie as our patron saint. There was a generation where you would see a reproduction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the bed-sitter of every student. Now it is obligatory to have a CD of Woody Guthrie's songs. He may not have written any great songs but he wrote many that will last and we admire him for the heroism of his life and for his indomitable spirit.

Argue

He never owned as much as a square yard of America's vast country but he could say: This land is our land. This land is your land. This land was made for you and me.

You could argue forever about what is folk music. I wouldn't care to be asked define it: like love, you recognise it when it smites you. There is a wealth of folk music in our country. Much of it was kept alive by our marginalised section of society, the Travelling people.

Neither Pecker Dunne nor Margaret Barry belonged to that class but they had a great deal in common with them: they travelled all over the country and they knew hardship and bad times but they kept the spirit alive.

RTE has long seemed indifferent to those two great pioneers. There are other wonderful singers, too, whom we rarely hear on TV or radio. They include Dolly McMahon and Eilish Moore. Singers, like prophets, aren't all recognised in their own land.

Fogra: My best wishes go westwards to Canada, to my old friend Joseph Duffin, who is in hospital in Toronto

- Con Houlihan