LAMENTING that “An aged man is but a paltry thing,” W.B. Yeats suggested that his afterlife expectation was to sail to Byzantium and become a mechanical golden bird with the charming destiny of melodiously chirping away to eternity. Having surpassed the age at which Yeats departed on that promising voyage, I appreciate his sailing imagery — and have the happy association of being dressed up as a sailor when I was five-years-old in Sialkot, which perhaps was a prescient act by my parents. My own expectation is that when the tide is finally up I shall sail not to Byzantium but to the shores of Wormlandia, and am struck by the happy thought that to be among a profusion of worms could be a positive outcome in case Yeats’s “paltry” is a misprint for ‘poultry’ and all he meant was that we become chickens in our old age. Well, accepting the reality that one is at the tail end of literature’s pecking order and one’s free-range crowing from the tops of Tennysonian immemorial elms will scarcely penetrate the digital cages where the young are cooped up, here is some more ruffling of the Old Cock’s feathers.

The intellectual and artistic world that had been provided with an explosive charge by the 18th century Enlightenment, with the 1776 American and the 1789 French Revolutions generating the environment of an unprecedented freedom for what the human mind could express when it was no longer brutally silenced by the twin choke-holds of monarchical tyranny and religious intolerance, produced an astonishing burst of creativity in the 19th century. This prepared the ground for the flourishing in the early decades of the 20th century of some of the richest new work in the arts and sciences in the history of the human race.

The ascendant avant-garde, proclaiming revolutionary manifestoes, each of which seemed a new declaration of intellectual independence, had taken charge and led to one of the most fertile periods in the arts during the 1960s and 1970s. The European nations seemed finally to have given up warring among themselves, there was European unity in the air — first as an Economic Community, then the Common Market, and later the European Union. The English Channel seemed to shrink and would soon become irrelevant with the building of the Chunnel. On the other shore, the introduction of the Boeing 707 passenger jet shrank the Atlantic, and it would not be long before the Jumbo Jet and the Concorde shrank it still further and it began to be referred to dismissively as the Pond.

Those of us who were in our 20s and beginning our literary careers in London’s swinging ’60s felt the exhilaration of a new era. The theatre was vibrating with thrilling intellectual energy. Gone were the banalities of the superficial and shallow playwrights like Terence Rattigan, Charles Morgan and Christopher Fry, and silenced at last was the voluble George Bernard Shaw, a perfect example of a clever self-promoting writer who dupes a generation into believing he is great only to be deservedly abandoned as irrelevant after his death. Instead, Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble performed in the West End, mesmerising full houses with Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle; there were impressive revivals of older European masters like Ibsen and Chekhov together with new productions of Pirandello, Dürrenmatt, and Beckett; there was the exciting new native talent on display of Harold Pinter, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and Shelagh Delaney; and if all of this was not enough of an intellectual carnival celebrating the avant-garde, there was the extraordinary Theatre of the Absurd of Jean Genet and Eugene Ionesco for those of us who wanted drama to take us to the imagination’s masked ball where beautiful phantoms danced, or, if we wanted a plainer contemporary drama, there were the Americans, Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams playing in the West End.

That was drama in the 1960s. Go to the West End today and what will you find? A Chorus Line, Viva Forever, The Lion King — well, it’s a long list of musicals and some formulaically composed plays on sociological themes, and search all you can for serious new drama, for an original play in a new form that excites the senses and exhilarates the intellect, and you will be lucky to find an early Tom Stoppard being revived at the National Theatre. So much for drama. Look next at poetry. When I put together my first volume of poems in 1963, all the major publishers in London gave serious consideration to new poetry. Faber & Faber, with T. S. Eliot as a director there, brought out some of the finest English poetry of the century. Macmillan launched the Macmillan Poets series that featured the work of living poets.

Penguin Books published anthologies of English poetry from Chaucer to the present as well as comprehensive anthologies of poetry in translation from the rest of the world while giving due prominence to living poets with its Modern Poets series that ran to 27 volumes featuring three poets each. Jonathan Cape launched a series of small pocket books that introduced some of the finest contemporary literature (such as the poetry of Francis Ponge) to English readers. Oxford University Press produced definitive anthologies and had an impressive list of new poets.

There were other major houses, like Eyre & Spottiswoode, Longmans, Dent, and even smaller ones like the Scorpion Press, who cultivated important poetry lists. And so, in 1963, as a young new poet, I had access to a wide range of publishers who competed to publish new poetry and a year later my first book was out from Routledge. And there it was in the new and smart bookshop across from Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road, Better Books, which took pride in stocking only those books that it considered of superior literary merit. That was in the 1960s. Better Books has long been gone, kicked off the stage by the newly ascendant popular culture that booed derisively at literary work that had no mass appeal. Go to Foyle’s today and look for new poetry. Except for a few authors brought out by Fabers and the occasional new volume of the second series of Penguin Modern Poets, most of the other publishers listed above will not have a single book there by a living poet, and you will be lucky to find the most important new book of English poetry published so far this century, Christopher Middleton’s Collected Poems brought out by Carcanet Press in Manchester.

In the ’60s, the London publishers took seriously their responsibility to sustain, nourish and advance intellectual culture of which literature was a significant component. Our generation had been educated to expect a high literary standard, and publishers met that demand — so much so that a new publisher like Calder & Boyars could survive profitably with a list that was exclusively literary, leaving to the established publishers the money-making popular writers. By the 1990s, the publishing scene, and indeed the entire cultural atmosphere, had changed. A quiet revolution had commenced at the end of the World War II with the momentous end of the British Raj in 1947 that inaugurated the dismantling of the colonies by all the European powers. Inspired by secular socialism, countries like Britain loosened the stranglehold of the class system. ‘Power to the people’, became the rallying cry.

Then came television, the jet engine, the Internet and social media, and the quiet revolution became a roaring scream of universal freedom and assertive materialism, and even those countries that instituted paternalistic theological constitutions could not entirely suppress the popular will. At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet Union was seen as a justification of western democratic ideals and the triumph of capitalism that worshipped the golden deity called the free market. Good citizens were good consumers, and ‘power to the people’ became the buying power of the people. Our earthly home was now a little marbled ball clutched in the tight, grasping fist of global commerce.

When Macmillan accepted my first novel in 1965, it was not because they expected it to be a commercial success but because they liked my writing. They were taking on not just one book but a writer who they expected would produce more books, which, in due course, would prove profitable; the first two or three books might make a loss, but they were an investment the publisher was willing to make with the hope of a future profit. Macmillan kept me for 27 years, publishing seven novels, two volumes of poetry, and four works of criticism. Publishers ceased to nurture writers in that fashion by the end of the 1980s. Globalisation demanded instant profit. A book’s money-making potential became a more important consideration than its literary quality.

A nation’s culture that for centuries had been the brilliant adornment reflecting its unique beauty was now considered no more than a commodity to be traded on the stock exchange. At a publisher’s luncheon in London in the 1970s I was seated next to the chairman of one of the largest British publishers and I suggested to him that he had a duty to sustain the national culture, but before I could conclude my remark, he grimaced, uttered the word culture in a sharply derogatory tone and said that if it lay in the gutter he would stick his heel in its face, he had no interest in culture, only in profit for his share holders. Ever since then I’ve been haunted by the image of a polished shoe coming hard down on a hollow-cheeked famished face in a filthy gutter, the sharp-edged heel being shoved into the mouth, repeatedly.

In 1990, the year in which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote: “Today literature and the arts are exposed to a different danger: they are threatened not by a doctrine or a political party but by a faceless, soulless, and directionless economic process.” Earlier in the 20th century, dictators from Stalin and Hitler to Pinochet and Khomeini had demanded the artist conform to their narrow notion of ideological purity or be exiled or exterminated, but by the end of the century that tyrannical role had been appropriated by the market. Paz wrote: “But the market, blind and deaf, is not fond of literature or of risk, and it does not know how to choose. Its censorship is not ideological: it has no ideas. It knows all about prices but nothing about values.”

Major publishers in London and New York were acquired by international corporations whose only interest in a nation’s cultural health was that it provided them with a muscular profit. The English publisher Hutchinson was bought by some business named Century, which was then bought by the American Random House, who in turn was bought by the German Bertelsmann group. Literature had no business with any aesthetic question related to the language in which it was composed; now the only question was, did it make the corporation money. The publishing industry had become brutal in the extermination of writers who did not make money. Innovative and experimental fiction, which had highlighted the exceptional genius of the 20th century for ‘making it new’ (Alfau, Borges, Beckett, Calvino…an impressive list that will take you alphabetically to Walser, Woolf), was branded as a new category: literary fiction — a polite variant of untouchable. Henry James’s remark that “the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life and that which has it not” has been changed to that which makes money and that which makes it not. By the second decade of the 21st century a new generation has grown up that has been led to associate literature with that which makes money and seen prizes given to works constructed on rudimentary forms that scrupulously avoid any stylistic experiment.

Consequently, young writers, eager for success, are increasingly indifferent to aesthetic questions — as I observed in my creative writing classes — and more focused on learning what the market demands.

So much for sounding like Pushkin’s golden cockerel whose crowing announces impending catastrophe. All imagined endings, however, are succeeded by promising new beginnings. Nature prefers evolution to extinction and encourages the human species to find new ways of survival by adapting to the changing environment. Even as global corporations acquired publishers during the last two decades of the 20th century and instituted the tyranny of profit, the Internet revolution took hold of young minds and unleashed a new force of freedom to counter that tyranny. Humans no longer depended on old-fashioned media to make their voices heard, Gutenberg was nearly made redundant by Zuckenberg, and a decade into the new century saw the old-fashioned book begin to be replaced by the e-book. By now the Kindle revolution has fought back the tyranny of profit and already online retailers like Amazon report selling more ebooks than the print versions. We are in the midst of a confusing and anarchic transitional period, which inevitably follows any revolution, but for printed books the writing is on the wall. Cheaper, and instantly available to all the inhabitants of Google Earth, e-books may well be the inauguration of planetary communication.

When in my sailor-suit days in Sialkot I first went to school, I carried a wooden-framed slate on which I scribbled the letters of the alphabet and stared at the world imagined by words. Over 70 years later, my sailing having taken me west across several oceans, I sit in my study with what looks almost identically like the old slate but is a new iPad and stare at a world imagined by words. There’s always the temptation, though, to sneak out into the poultry yard and switch to YouTube to take a peep at the Dixie Chicks.