Into Academia

AE Housman was a celebrated academic who used his scholarly rigour and discipline to produce poetry that was firmly in the domain of, and available to, the literate Common Man. It promoted poetry as a pleasure. Geoffrey Hill is the severest of academics who takes poetry firmly into the exquisite and rarified domain of academia where only those few who can congratulate themselves on being able to follow him there can go. He takes it away from the literate Common Man, as so many of the intensely cerebral high priests of Modernism do, thus ensuring that poetry is the recreation of a tiny, self-flattering elite and further guaranteeing that its attractions will wither and die for the Common Man. He produces poetry which is ridiculous in this way such as:

If I were to grasp once, in emulation,
work of the absolute, origin-creating mind,
its opus est, conclusive
otherness, the veil
of certitude discovered as itself
that which is to be resolved,
I should hold for my own, my self-giving,
my retort upon Emerson's 'alienated majesty',
the De Causa Dei of Thomas Bradwardine.

Even though poetry with its eye on poetic pleasures can educate, poetry is not supposed to be a test of erudition or a deliberate and explicit education.