When more than half a million people, rather than the expected 150,000, arrived on the Isle of Wight in 1970 and turned the annual rock festival into a frenzied orgy of terror for many of the artists, it took the quiet, meditative songs of Leonard Cohen to becalm the audience in a performance that has been written into legend. The spellbinding effect he had on the volatile crowd is a quality still evident today, as his recent unforgettable concerts here have demonstrated. Few artists have inspired the kind of fan loyalty that follows him; perhaps his themes – carnal pleasure, the quest for the spiritual – account for such devotion.

He began his Isle of Wright performance by reciting three poems, a reminder that before taking up the guitar he had established his credentials as a much-lauded poet and novelist in his native Canada. Although he has described himself simply as a "worker in song", his gifts as a poet – influenced by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca – are what separated and distinguished his artful songs from the general body of work pouring out of the 1960s and 1970s generation of popular singer-songwriters.

Cohen has taken a range of influences – the Bible, his Jewish background, Buddhism and Hank Williams – and blended them into his songs of love and lamentation, lust and longing, the sacred and profane, mournful and witty. With Hallelujah – one of the most recorded songs of our era – he even became a psalmist for the secular age. What Simon Schama has called his "intensely felt and highly visualised writing" is a compelling ingredient in his work – his blurring of the lines between poetry and song.

Tomorrow Cohen is 80 but his creative drive has been undiminished by age; with his new album, Popular Problems, he proves that and adds another room to the "tower of song" he has built over the last five decades since he first emerged as one of the great true artists of his generation.