The poet laureate Andrew Motion last night called for an overhaul of how poetry is taught in school to dispel once and for all the myth that it is "difficult and irrelevant".
Poetry was a "basic and visceral" force through which people felt impelled to express themselves in times of great joy or trouble. Giving the annual arts council lecture at the Royal Society of Arts in London, he said its natural "hotline to our hearts" was demonstrated by vast outpouring of verse by ordinary people after the death of Princess Diana, or after the Soho bombing.
"It's a high claim, but it's one that I have no hesitation in making. We forget this emotional power at our peril. Poetry is always a primitive and visceral thing, however it might be surrounded with various kinds of sophistication."
He said as well as bringing more poets into schools, there should be special weekend conferences for teachers so they could discuss how to get over the mental block that poetry was difficult to teach and somehow irrelevant.
Mr Motion said there needed to be greater efforts to demystify poetry, and said teachers were as important as poets in this drive. Although he welcomed the government's literary hour scheme, "literacy is the beginning of a process and beyond it lies the huge country of free and unhindered reading, and of culture in general".
After the death of Diana, he was "struck by how many thousands of the bouquets had little verses attached to them. The same thing happened some time later, when flowers given in memory of those killed in the Soho bomb were laid out in Soho Square. Almost all those flowers were also accompanied by a poem. Most, to be frank, were not really literature at all - but that isn't the point.
"The same thing happens at moments of intense pleasure and celebration as well, like when we fall in love."
Mr Motion also dealt with his own initially controversial appointment as laureate, and used the example of his hero Keats to allude to how a writer could be a public poet without either being on the barricades or a stooge of royalty or the government.
"I'm not trying to suggest that I want to shy away from the reality of these events," he said. "Rather that I want to engage with them while remaining alert to their symbolic values.
"The poem I wrote for the wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys Jones, for example, is one which wants to remind its readers of the questions which preoccupy all people in love and getting married: will the things we say today last into the future etc.
"If I had written any of these poems in another way, I'm certain that I would have been lured into writing to order.
"In every case I had a phrase from Keats's letters resonating in my head: 'We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us.'"
