"I think in the last 60 years since Ezra Pound edited The Wasteland for T S Eliot, poetry entered a very rarefied world and became very difficult for people without a PhD to understand," Felix laments.

"The rhythm went out, the metre went out and all the forms of poetry that had served us for 500 years or more were all thrown out.

"And I think that the baby went out with the bath water."

Since then, the public have voted with their feet and with their wallets: "They have voted with their feet by not going along to poetry readings and with their wallets by not buying the books."

Now Felix is doing his bit to reclaim poetry - by reclaiming its traditional forms and, in doing so, reclaiming its traditional audiences.

Felix brings his Did I Mention the Free Wine tour to the Komedia, Brighton on October 13, promoting his new collection of poetry Homeless In My Heart (go to www.felixdennis.com to register for a free ticket to the event).

"The title is really just me mocking myself. You can't easily get people out on a cold night to listen to poetry with just two or three free glasses of wine, however good the wine is!"

But the events, like the poetry, have certainly taken off - a direct response to the kind of poetry Felix is writing, something deeply personal within the constraints of those traditional forms.

"You can write beautiful poetry that is not personal and which everyone knows", Felix concedes - but that's poetry that misses the point.

"Good poetry forces a kind of honesty and revelation that I just don't experience when I am writing a non-fiction book like How To Get Rich. I also wrote Mohammed Ali's biography many years ago. It is still in print. But when I am writing things like that, it is like I am writing speeches. I don't feel constrained to be personal or revelatory in the way that I do when I am writing poetry."

And that's a lesson Felix has had to learn.

"I think I missed the point for the first few years of writing poetry. I was so anxious, in writing formal, traditional poetry, not to make any mistakes in the metre or in the forms.

"If you think of the form as the decanter, then you can think of the idea, the poem itself as the wine. I think I had three or four years in which I wrote some fairly good poetry, more by luck than judgement, but I was just too obsessed with getting the form or the decanter absolutely right.

"I was a bit like a lower-middle class person some 50 years ago being invited to an upper-class person's home and wanting to know which knives and forks to use.

"But that was me going through my apprenticeship. I am less concerned now about the form. I have enough confidence in what I am doing to be less worried about my craft. Now I am thinking about the wine all the time!"