
https://www.happenstancepress.com/index.php/blog/entry/too-old-to-start-writing-poetry
Keats was dead at 25, Shelley at 29, Dylan Thomas at 39, Sylvia Plath at 30. Chatterton didn’t even make it to 18.
But Fergus Allen, who reads at this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, didn’t start the poetry business seriously until after retirement. His first book-length collection was published when he was 72. There have been three others since, and now, at ninety, he will be conversation with Peter Blegvad about all of this in November.