An anecdote comes to mind about an art teacher in a London East End school. Displaying and naming a famous painting by Botticelli – the Primavera – to her class, she was taken aback by one of her pupils announcing in good street slang 'I don't see what's so prima about that!' Looking at the painting again herself, she suddenly realised that she didn't either. She'd always been told it was Great Art and had accepted this without ever applying her own critical faculty to the question.

Although 'primavera' is Italian for the Spring season, split into two its original components literally mean first truth. But Botticelli's painting belies that truth, as, although the scene ostensibly represents the coming of Spring, there are ripe fruit on the trees in the background. So, although its technicianship is supremely good, from the representational point of view it's maybe not quite as prima (or indeed as vera) as we were told.

The opinions of cognoscenti and 'experts' about art are a powerful social force because at heart we're a herd species, and they frequently override our own capacities for independent judgement. So 'what this poem means to me' may all too often in reality be no more than 'what I've been indoctrinated into feeling about it'.

Poetry's lack of physical substance renders its appreciation more susceptible to thought control of this kind from 'above' than other artistic works. Furthermore, in our mercantile age a strong commercial interest has become dominant. For over half a century, publishing poetry has not been seriously economic. Not surprisingly, publishers have tended to preferentially accept what is most likely to sell in large numbers: work that's 'accessible', i.e. that doesn't require much attention, emotional involvement or background knowledge on the part of the reader. Therefore vocabulary tends to be basic, allusion is out, subject matter is mundane, and structure tends to the informal, regardless of whether the message is optimally conveyed by these choices or not. The recent and rapid rise of 'Instagram poetry' is an extreme manifestation of 'accessibility before all', although the tendency has existed at some level for a long time.

But there's another quite long-standing trend in parallel with this, the primary aim of which seems to be to maximise inaccessibility for its own sake. A randomly picked example 1 from my bookshelf (from a mainstream publisher of the late '60s) consists of 366 stanzas with no consistent structure, all but four of which are unrhymed quatrains of no more than about twenty words each. With the exception of two stanzas that include a colon, no punctuation except a terminal stop is used throughout, regardless of the effect of this on meaning. So much for the form, but the content almost defies description. It meanders vaguely and sporadically around depressive consideration of a forthcoming (or is it a consummated? Or failing?) marriage, interspersed by some apparently irrelevant asides. For example:

Is she my wife

Am I her husband

It seems so strange

And I am bilious.

The overall effect is laborious and confusing. Nevertheless, the publisher's blurb emphasises the book's 'emotional appeal' and 'passionate intensity' – hidden characteristics I for one failed to discern when reading it.

That was a book by an apparently unknown, even possibly 'one-off', poet. But there's worse, and by well respected, even lauded, authors. Eliot's Wasteland comes to mind. I'm probably going to annoy a lot of people who've been persuaded it's Great Poetry, but I have to query: why?

Coming to The Wasteland tolerably fresh (having ignored it entirely since school days) I have some specific questions.

Firstly, why do its five short lines of dedication to Pound require the reader to be conversant with Latin and (presumably ancient) Greek in addition to English?

Secondly, why do various poems add the need for German (The Burial of the Dead), French (The Fire Sermon) and Italian (What the Thunder Said)? According to the author's notes, all this seems to be borrowed text, but it remains untranslated. And it gets worse – the notes themselves introduce further linguistic demands, by citing additional texts in foreign languages (also untranslated) for comparison. So thanks a lot for demonstrating what an erudite linguist you are, but sadly it's all lost on me.

Thirdly, why do a mere five poems require such copious 'author's notes'? In the Project Gutenberg online edition, that pans out as fractionally over ten pages of verse, and four pages of notes. Doesn't this suggest Eliot was aware he was being obscure?

Finally, what the hell does it all actually mean? I assume charitably that each of the five numbered entities is a poem in its own right, so there's no expectation of a common theme or thread to the collection as a whole. But I still wonder why, even in individual poems, Eliot can't seem to stick to the point. For example, The Burial of the Dead only mentions burial in line 71 of 76, having in the meantime meandered from reminiscences of trips to the German countryside, via passing reference to a 'famous clairvoyante' and some erroneous references to the tarot, to a chance meeting in London and an ensuing conversation in which (at last – Whew!) the burial is referred to almost as an aside. So why that title?

The general impression I get reading The Wasteland with unblinkered eyes is that it's primarily intended to demonstrate how clever the poet is, rather than to impart anything specific to the reader. It reminds me most of the antics of a small child performing some elementary gymnastic contortion while yelling 'look at me, Mum!' But, as always, there's a saving grace. Works like this provide sustenance and prestige for echelons of 'experts' with the self-proclaimed duty of interpreting to us what we may at last find wasn't worth the effort anyway.

The first truth may ultimately turn out be that we've been fooled. For our sanity's sake, we shouldn't fall for it, but instead seek out the gap between the ostentatiously 'accessible' and the intentionally inaccessible, as that's where true poetry is most likely to be found.

 [1] John Ellis, Day Book, London, Mitre Press 1968