It's entirely possible that you were taught by a pseud. That's unfortunate if so. I did a degree in English lit. The poetry classes I took looked something lik

It's entirely possible that you were taught by a pseud. That's unfortunate if so. I did a degree in English lit. The poetry classes I took looked something like this: - Old and Middle English Poetry (Beowulf, Chaucer, etc.) - Elizabethan Poetry - Paradise Lost - The Shakespearean Sonnet - 18th Century Classicism (Alexander Pope, etc.) - Victorian Poetry (Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, etc.) - 20th Century Irish Poetry (Yeats, that kind of thing) - 20th Century American Modernism Only in the last class was there was anything like you described, and even then it only made up a fraction of the material covered. Here is one of the most critically acclaimed poems of the last 40 years. It's perfectly easy to understand. http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/a-martian-sends-a-postcard-home/ http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/a-martian-sends-a-post...