Novelty value

It's no LOLling matter. For many teachers and parents, texts and tweets are destroying English, creating a generation unable to spell, use grammar, or appreciate the beauty of any piece of writing longer than 140 characters.

But according to Carol Ann Duffy, Britain's poet laureate, these shortened forms of communication are more literary than one might imagine. The poem, she says, is just another form of texting - essentially, both are 'a way of saying more with less'.

For Duffy, poetry is 'language at play': it makes deep connections between people and words, expressing big ideas in a condensed form. Tweets and texts are the same because they force us to squeeze as much meaning as we can into 140 characters, and to think very carefully about the words we're using.

The idea that a tweet can be a poem is just one example of how notions about literature are changing all the time.

And even the words of the English language - literature's building blocks - are rapidly evolving. Young people's speech, for example, is littered with new words, picked up from new media, different cultures, or just made up; slang words like OMG are now in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Throughout the history of literature, writers have always struggled to introduce new forms to what is considered 'proper' poetry.

When Milton wrote Paradise Lost in 1667, people were shocked that it didn't rhyme. Now, most modern poets don't even have to write in a regular metre, or use proper grammar, or spelling. According to Carol Ann Duffy, even bands like the Arctic Monkeys are 21st Century poets. Pop music and rap can be forms of poetry, with skilful use of language, rhyme and rhythm.

This view is supported even at the highest academic levels. English students at Cambridge University in 2008 were asked to compare a 16th Century Sir Walter Raleigh poem with Love is a Losing Game, by Amy Winehouse

Are poets like Duffy right to embrace texts and tweets with such enthusiasm? The idea of tearing down the conventional barriers and definitions of art does have a certain attraction. Why shouldn't the new poetry be something that exists beyond the confines of the dusty library and the printed page? Texts, tweets and song lyrics could make poetry accessible to everyone, bringing poems into everyday life.

Not so fast, warn the guardians of tradition. Great poems are extraordinary works of art, containing deep truths about life, nature and human experience. To call texts and tweets poetry is to insult the genius of the poets of the past and to diminish poetry as an artistic medium.