“The great tradition of English poetry has become an almost exclusively academic interest. The days when every literate household contained a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury are long gone. Spenser, Sidney and Milton don’t benefit from popularity-boosting costume dramas. They demand a sort of concentration we are reluctant to give – you can’t read them in the bath or on the train. Even the more accessible Romantics, such as Coleridge and Shelley, engage us more as psychological cases than as versifiers. The idea of a poet is more alluring than the idea of a poem. We’re a cynical, materialistic lot, and we want language to be functional, not fanciful. Yet at a shallow level we consume more poetry than ever before.”