Difficult pleasures

From the Guardian, Roy Hattersley writing about ‘difficult’ to understand poetry. It is strange that all poetry is logged under the single heading. There are many categories of fiction, music, theatre but it seems that all poetry must be the same. Maybe we need some subheadings (apart from the period-based ones), not to allow people to avoid what they don’t like (which they will do) but to allow people who really want to read well to know where to go for guidance. Schmidt’s ‘Reading Modern Poetry‘ is a good introduction but ‘modern poetry’ is just too wide a heading.