No, metrophobia isn’t a fear of underground railways, it’s a fear of poetry and it’s embarrassingly common.

My career has been spent roughly half in schools and half in business. In schools, a big part of my life was taken up reading, discussing and delighting in poetry inside the classroom and out. So much so, I’ve written books on arguably the three most challenging poets in the English language.

In business life, I have occasionally been foolhardy enough to make some passing reference to a poem or a poet in the hotel bar after a day spent with colleagues fiddling with a slide pack or playing with a project plan on a spreadsheet. I wouldn’t recommend it as a career development strategy.  

I’ve worked closely with dozens of well-educated, self-evidently successful adults for whom poem really is a four-letter word. Watch their eyes widen in horror at the mere thought that you might expect them to recognise a quotation or a poet’s name.

What on earth happened to these people in classrooms and lecture theatres? How did they come out of all those years of formal schooling so intellectually maimed that they are pathologically averse to verse?

Why is metrophobia so widespread and far more importantly, why is that situation culturally debilitating?

It would be easy to go down the teacher-bashing route and blame it all on progressives, traditionalists or any one of a number of blanket and blinkered terms critics of schools are fond of deploying. But poetry is never easy to teach. It is human expression at its most sophisticated and demanding.

Children of all ages and abilities are inevitably puzzled by it, not least because it looks like nothing else on a page they are familiar with. If they are lucky, they will have been prepared by hearing nursery rhymes and perhaps songs, but that only takes them so far.

The moment you ask a child to really think about a poem, that hard, demanding activity that applies to absolutely every successful act of learning, whatever the subject, many struggle, before capitulating entirely in the face of such a toweringly impenetrable wall.

You might ask what does it matter? I’ve seen ample evidence in the business half of my career that many people’s view of a 21st-century education has no room for anything as erudite or difficult. But then they usually think erudite is a type of glue.

The personality of poetry

It helps once you appreciate that great poets are often intense and extreme personalities. They have earned their stature not simply because someone likes what they write, but because to write anything worth reading at all they have often pushed themselves to a degree of intellectual intensity most of us shun in favour of a comfy sofa and a wilting, chocolate digestive.

Poets really do suffer for their art. It’s no accident that John Donne was famously suicidal, Ovid an exile, Dylan Thomas drank himself into oblivion and I’ll leave you to decide why Milton went blind.

If you doubt me, you won’t once you’ve listened to Sylvia Plath reading her own poem Daddy, online.

Once you recognise that poets function at the periphery of man’s knowledge and experience, every bit as much as cosmologists, and that their poetry is a wholeheartedly sincere attempt to confront the inexorable conditions of human life, then there is no excuse for metrophobia and every hope of a cure.

That is why its widespread occurrence is so culturally debilitating, and why we need to acknowledge and deal with it.

What led me to write this article was research I’ve been doing for a new book. Part of that research involved watching and listening to a number of poets, reading their work online; one of increasingly few delicacies in the ocean of garbage, that infinite slush pile we call the internet serves up.

It was there I realised where rampant metrophobia really stems from, and why I now sympathise so much with metrophobic adults who have been cheated of such a rich vein of their cultural inheritance.

The most striking was an online video of a poet performing in an Oxford Street department store. I’ve often thought, considering the direction theatre has taken, it’s only a matter of time before productions of Romeo and Juliet are sponsored by Relate, or King Lear by care homes. 

Watching the performance, I was strangely drawn, not to the poet’s deliberate and curiously clanging tone, but to the audience, and particularly their behaviour.

Whoever recorded this event had decided they were an important component of the entire evening, so the camera took in the small sea of faces intent on the speaker, pausing every so often for a close up on someone especially rapt or studiedly amused.

The average age was about 23 and that sincere sympathy which had moved me to reflect on the disarmed army of metrophobes out there, tipped over into anger.

No wonder, I thought, so many of you feel excluded, because I realised this calculated, fake urbanity wasn’t new to me and I had seen it many times before, whenever writers and audiences gel.           

A meeting of the Pope’s spiritual advisers could hardly be more esoteric. Smug is far too short and too slight a word to describe the complacency and arrogance that lit up one face after another like a contagious yawn. For someone like me, who loves literature because it distils genius, it was excruciating to witness.

Superiority oozed from every pore like invisible sweat as audience members competed with each other over who got the jokes quickest or best. I imagine a Scientology thanksgiving dinner is quite similar. 

If contemporary poets want ordinary, educated folk to appreciate and value what they do, then they and their fans need to climb down a peg or two.

In the meantime, I promise all you metrophobes bold enough to give it another go: dead poets are definitely better society. 

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author