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     This essay is about the teaching of poetry in schools. You may think you’re not interested. Before you decide it is a dull subject in general, though, try this parlour game. Sit round with a group of friends and make a list of fifteen twentieth-century poems that children should have read by age sixteen. Pass the lists round anonymously, and guess whose belong to whom, on grounds of politics, prudery, and sheer nostalgia. Then decide whose list is best, for youth and for the nation. If the Kiplingites seem likely to have a stand-up fight with the Plathites, remind them of the bit of ‘If’ about keeping their heads when all around are losing theirs.

     Most people lose their heads about schools – their feelings are too personal, and lie too deep, to stay calm. The consequences, especially in politicians, can be strange indeed – consider John Major’s masochistic quest to recreate the very grammar schools which failed him so miserably, or David Blunkett’s current pounding of the primary teachers who patronised him forty years ago. Feelings about poetry in schools are doubly irrational, since many credit it with being the nation’s soul, and even those who loathe it accord it a mystical, suspicious power. It is understandable, then, that in the ideological conflicts over the curriculum which have rocked schools in the last fifteen years, poetry should have been a favourite battleground: it was, for example, the proposal to teach Pope and Dryden to all fifteen-year-olds, irrespective of their basic literacy, which finally brought down the ghastly John Patten. What is less self-evident is how Ted Hughes, rather than Yeats, Eliot, Auden, or Larkin, should have triumphed in these battles to become, overwhelmingly, the twentieth-century poet whom today’s pupils are most likely to study and write about (Adrian Mitchell and the Liverpool Poets are, of course, the poets most likely to be merely read and enjoyed).

     Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain blew into schools with Kes and mixed-ability teaching, promulgated by a generation of radical young sixties and seventies teachers. They took the Alvarez line, and embraced Hughes as a poetic Alan Sillitoe or David Storey: a passionate, demotic alternative to fusty old Larkin. The Tory assaults of the 80s were designed to batter exactly these teachers, but, though the curriculum was endlessly reformed by Clarke, Baker, and Patten, though committees resigned, were reappointed, though English Literature emerged as a narrower, more tested and trammelled subject than it had ever been, Hughes retained his popularity, popping up in every anthology, appearing in curriculum orders and exam questions. These were the days of Clause 28, the times when Daily Mail reporters were regularly sent out to “monster” teachers: Hughes’s work was popular not least because it was perceived as ideology-free, since it was about nature, and hardly ever dealt explicitly with human sexuality or politics. In the cowed, rattled nineties, Hughes became more popular still, boosted by his increasing status in the literary world, the tainting of Larkin’s and Eliot’s biographies with un-PC discoveries, and the fact that even though Seamus Heaney is a Nobel Laureate, his work still requires teachers to explain Ireland. In many schools, Hughes now fills, with Wilfred Owen, an extremely large proportion of the very small space – fifteen poems are probably a generous estimate of poems actually written about – which the curriculum allows for twentieth-century poets.

     To be specific: primary pupils will read at least The Iron Man and probably Meet my Folks! during Literacy Hour (Season Songs is less popular, strewn as it is with dead fluffy lambs). If they’re lucky, they may go on to study some poems from the Hughes and Heaney edited The Rattle Bag during Years 7 and 8 (that’s Senior 1 and 2 to anyone who left school before 1990). This will be followed with ‘Hawk Roosting’ in Year 9, complete with a classroom display of fascist-looking eagles, and a selection of animal poems in Years 10 or 11, illustrated or not, depending on the braininess of the pupils. Other poems studied at this time may well be taken from Hughes and Heaney’s National Curriculum conforming volume, The Schoolbag. At A’ level, Lupercal and Crow are popular set texts – Crow, in particular, is a frequent progenitor of black tee-shirt wearing and mounds of execrable teenage verse – while essays comparing ‘The Thought-Fox’ with Heaney’s ‘Digging’ are so frequently set that you can download dozens from the internet. Even students studying the anorexic’s friend, Sylvia Plath, will probably be doing so out of Hughes’s Selected. Hughes has, in effect, been nationalised.

     It is a strange position for a poet such as Hughes to occupy. He is no Pope, eager to set down rules of human behaviour, no Kipling, making national myths and seeking to speak in the voice of the common man – no Larkin, even, reflecting on the encroaching cities, on work, secularism and disappointment. Hughes’ poetry has ploughed one furrow only: his verse presents the Other, the animal, the savage, to civilised man. Almost by definition, it must be read in opposition to other literature. ‘The Thought-Fox’ is not a metaphor for thought, it is a momentary flash of itself – “A sudden sharp stink of fox” – which cannot be contained long – between two ticks of the clock only – on the printed page. It certainly cannot stay long enough to develop a metaphysical argument, or to point a moral, or to be a national anthem.

     Why, then, are we as a nation so anxious to expose the young to Hughes? Partly, I think, for fear of the younger generation and what we have done to them. The young are another country, even those only fifteen or twenty years younger than us. Today’s teenagers, even the minority who live in our increasingly crowded countryside, have grown up in a world incomprehensibly warmer, less textured, more sexualised, more secularised, more crowded with consumer labels, computer games and video images than the world of our own childhood. They have run less, are fatter, and have encountered far fewer animals. Those animals they do see are mostly domestic pets, which appear, relentlessly anthropomorphised and subject to “rescue” and operations, on all channels. The effects can be extraordinary. Where I most recently taught, in outer London, I found myself uprooting daffodils from my garden to illustrate Herbert’s ‘The Flower’, because my students simply did not know what a bulb was. I kept a list of words of which they had never heard: Calvary, Eden, pagan, crimson...

     Of course, faced with such a generation, we want them to read ‘Pike’, and confront them with “stilled legendary depth... deep as England”. We long to treat sentimental Babe watchers to Hughes’s ‘View of a Pig’ – “just so much/ poundage of lard and pork”, or ‘Furby’ owners to ‘Esther’s Tomcat’. We want to change them with this confrontation with the Other, stir them up with the romantic sublime. That is exactly the problem. The sublime – someone else’s sublime – can be extremely annoying.

     Do you remember being taught Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’? As an adult, I appreciate the poem for its simplicity and grace. As a child, I simply thought the poem was revoltingly smug and soppy, and that Wordsworth was a poof – dancing with the daffodils, indeed. I do not think I was alone in this – I recently taught ‘Daffodils’ on an “environment” themed paper for GCSE, and noted that its capacity to enrage was, if anything, enhanced in an audience who were not completely clear on the difference between a daffodil and a tulip.

     Hughes and Wordsworth have more in common than simply being radical nature poets who settled down to be Poet Laureate. The structure of ‘The Thought-Fox’ for example, is startlingly similar to that of ‘Daffodils’: both open by showing us the poet in contemplation – Wordsworth wandering “lonely as a cloud”, Hughes sitting at his desk; both are then surprised by a natural phenomenon which grows larger and nearer until it fills the eye – the daffodils out-do the waves, the fox comes across clearings until we see “widening deepening greenness” of its eyes; both poems end with a reminder of the poem’s literariness – Hughes is back at his desk, Wordsworth on his couch; Hughes’s “page is printed”, Wordsworth reminds us that the daffodils are a memory, one he can call up at will. These endings enact the paradox of recording the romantic sublime – that it cannot, by definition, be contained in words, that only its shadow can enter the page. The poet’s task, therefore, must be to use sensual details – the snow and the woods, or the hill and the daffodils – and the music of verse to make the reader’s imagination into a “dark hole” for the fox to enter.

     To make this journey, though, the reader must be able to imagine some of the sensual details, and here Hughes is almost as liable to lose a young reader as Wordsworth. Hughes’s language has, of course, for the modern ear, far more vigour and ease than Wordsworth’s, his observations are startlingly devoid of sentiment – but none of that matters if the reader has never experienced a lonely walk, or a high wind, or seen a lamb or a pike or even a scruffy tomcat, or if, like many teenagers, he is so focused on human emotions, such as desire or resentment of his parents, that the natural world seems, for the moment, an irritating adult fiction. When he is then expected to perceive the sublime within this landscape and, inevitably, fails, he is often made to feel not just stupid but lacking in soul. It is a worse experience than reading Herbert without a bulb on hand – for Herbert’s flower is in the end a metaphor, part of an argument, not a flower in itself. You can disagree with it, but not fail at it.

     This is not to say that poetry should be “relevant” in the dreary sense of mirroring the reader’s life. Nor that teachers should not teach Hughes, or indeed, shouldn’t make their pupils angry – as a teacher, I always made sure I did both. But if Hughes is the establishment – the nationalised poet – rather than an alternative voice to, for example Larkin, who approaches his sublime through advertisements, graffitti, and ambulances, then many pupils will leave school believing that poetry is concerned with experiences other than their own, and that they have failed at it. The vast majority, unlike, for example, the majority of Italians or Finns, will never read any literary poetry again.

     Paradoxically, schools seem to be turning away from Hughes at the very moment when Hughes’s literary reputation is undergoing a beatification. Armitage and Duffy are set this year for the first time on a GCSE syllabus, and will be studied by all fifteen-year-olds. The effort this entails for teachers will certainly mean that their work, and the work of other contemporary poets, will trickle down into lower years. The Rattle Bag, Hughes’s and Heaney’s 1982 anthology, will probably always have a place in schools, since this tumultuous gathering of the ancient and modern, ballads and fragments, jokes and lyrics, the laconic and the tragic is certainly the finest anthology ever put together for a younger readers, and many adult readers’ favourite anthology of all time. The School Bag, however, issued in 1997 to corner the market in the twenty-four dead good poets prescribed on the National Curriculum, is, though equally romantic in taste, a far more lumpen volume. Like so many nationalised industries, the Laureates forgot their customers: much of The School Bag consists either of hefty texts which schools already possess, such as ‘Lycidas’ and ‘Letter to Dr Arbuthnot’, but without the notes necessary to teach them, or texts which schools do not possess for the sound reason that very few children can, or ever will, understand them – Ezra Pound’s ‘Canto I’, and Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’. In many classrooms, it is quietly being shelved.

     Now that we have Tales from Ovid, The Birthday Letters and innumerable plaudits and prizes for Hughes’s work, though, they may be taken down again. The literary world seems, for once, to be following schools, creating an atmosphere of holiness around Hughes’s work in which it is difficult even to say that his achievement was, by its nature, a narrow one. I do not think this new sort of nationalisation is useful to the enjoyment of Hughes’s work – the thought-fox should be a flash of private delight, not compulsorily taught, nor stuffed and displayed in the Millennium Dome. I do wonder though, if the current enthusiasm has anything in common with our impulse to teach Hughes: an apparent escape from politics, gender, psychoanalysis and ourselves; a wish to relocate poetry and the sublime back where the Romantics put it, in a natural England, a world of textures, sounds and creatures which few of us have in fact experienced.