Our Geoffrey Again - Crushed by Erudition

They are not poems. They are exercises in scholarship, prescriptive and didactic. They arouse resentment in me as a reader as I feel I am being manoeuvred and manipulated by a hostile incubus that leaves no room for inter-personal light and space. They inhabit me but that inhabiting is unwelcome and crowding. I am being taught too explicitly in a too readily assumed pupil-teacher dynamic rather than simply delighted. They weigh upon me with a kind of dusty pedantry. Perhaps the author is a lecturing professorial bully. I don’t want to be in his company. In his poems he is ‘telling’ me what to think not trusting me to know my own mind. Every poem is a seminar. Great poetry can educate a reader but this is too explicit and too deliberate. He too readily assumes vacuity in his readers and is, thus, unmannerly to them. My dislike for the man puts me off his poetry because I cannot accept the relationship he requires with me. I make these remarks not because I have not understood the appeal of his poetry to his fans but because I have understood it. Ultimately I can't accept his prescription that erudition is the only route to enjoyment for a reader and the only source of inspiration for a poet.

Look at the way he speaks about the poor nurses and then the way he castigates his potential readers via ‘the Angel of Poetry,’ assuming from the outset that it is a given that they will cretinously approach his poetry in the ‘wrong’ way expecting the wrong things of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiuMKASXJLU&t=316s&frags=pl%2Cwn