The actor and writer Stephen Fry has turned his considerable firepower on contemporary poetry. Now in his own 'how-to' guide he calls for a return to the traditional world of stanza and metre. David Smith reports

Stephen Fry has launched a scathing attack on the 'arse-dribble' of modern poets and revealed a private passion for writing his own verse.

In his new book, The Ode Less Travelled, a guide to writing poetry, Fry argues in favour of traditional form and metre.

He expresses admiration for WH Auden, Robert Browning and other dead poets, but condemns 'the condition of English-language poetics' today as 'tattered and tired'.

He goes on: 'Add a feeble-minded political correctness to the mix and it is a wonder that any considerable poetry at all has been written over the last 50 years. It is as if we have all been encouraged to believe that form is a kind of fascism, and that to acquire knowledge is to drive a jackboot into the face of those poor souls who are too incurious, dull-witted or idle to find out what poetry can be.'

These candid comments come in the month that National Poetry Day failed to capture the public imagination and prompted calls for 'an ambassador' to help give poets the same star status as leading novelists.

Fry, who starred in the films Wilde and Gosford Park and directed Bright Young Things, describes the 'free-form meanderings' of modern poets as 'emotional masturbation' and illustrates the point by writing his own example:

cigaretted and drinked

loaded against yourself

you seem so yes bold

irreducible

but nuded and afterloved

you are not so strong

are you

after all

He then analyses the sample: 'The above is precisely the kind of worthless arse-dribble I am forced to read whenever I agree to judge a poetry competition. It took me under a minute and a half to write, and while I dare say you can see what utter wank it is, there are many who would accept it as poetry ...

'Like so much of what passes for poetry today it is also listless, utterly drained of energy and drive - a common problem with much contemporary art, but an especial problem with poetry that chooses to close itself off from all metrical pattern and form. It is like music without beat or shape or harmony: not music at all, in fact.'

Launching the book at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Fry insisted that he was not a 'hidebound old dinosaur' who loathed free verse.

'You can set yourself new rules or you can write with no structure for a particular poem and it can be very wonderful; I just think it's so much harder and so much less fun than using existing forms,' he said.

'In the same way if you want to go to the guitar and make a noise without using the chord structure, you're welcome to, but don't ask me to be in the room with you. The chances are that it will be horrible unless you happen to have extraordinary natural human gifts.'

He believes that a lot of 'modern poetry can be listless and, perhaps more unforgivably than anything, just simply lazy. It's not that it's naive or formless, just: "Go back and work harder at it before you show it to the public, it's not ready." It's not worth time. Poems are not like novels or speeches or emails or texts.

'I admire the popular poets of today - Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Ian Patterson, Don Paterson, Wendy Cope. A lot of these poets write in forms. Carol Ann Duffy uses sonnets, Seamus Heaney has written some of the best sonnets of the past 100 years and also writes in villanelles. Wendy Cope writes in triolets.'

Fry wrote several poems for the book, published this week by Hutchinson at £10.99, but said these were merely to demonstrate the poetic forms.

His heartfelt works would remain secret, partly because of 'cowardice and embarrassment'.

'It gets locked away in a drawer and I occasionally take it out,' he said. 'I tend to go round with a notebook and I doodle lines and sometimes I hear things. I called up an American friend of mine, a writer, and his answerphone message gave me two perfect lines of 10 syllables: "Sorry I cannot take your call right now/ So leave a message when you hear the tone." That inspired me to think about metrical patterns in speech.

'It's one of the few things I can do that can be private. I can't get away with that in my private life, because who my partners might be, and my friends are, is something journalists can see in restaurants or whatever, or rumours get out. But my poetry, I think, can be very, very private. It's not that it's full of shameful confessions and embarrassing in that sense, but I think it is like some people must have watercolours which you're just not ready for anyone else to look at yet.'

Kitchen Villanelle

How rare it is when things go right

When days go by without a slip

And don't go wrong, as well they might.

The smallest triumphs cause delight -

The kitchen's clean, the taps don't drip,

How rare it is when things go right.

Your ice cream freezes overnight,

Your jellies set, your pancakes flip

And don't go wrong, as well they might ...

· Extract of a poem by Stephen Fry in his new book, The Ode Less Travelled, published by Hutchinson