Isn’t it funny how the further away one tries to steer from a cliché, the quicker one seems to arrive at one. Sometimes I think all poetry is a cliché. Whilst reading poetry and getting into the hang of the rhyming scheme, it can seem that each punctuated syllable and closing couplet is the most obvious choice the poet could have made, and once again one is driven into a frustrating cul-de-sac, reading what seems to be another man’s rhyming game. Your typical middle-class, emotionally suppressed intellectual; hunched over his notepad, exciting himself over whether or not he will be beaten by literature, or if he can sneak in an accent to smoke out another hidden syllable in order to fit the structure of his favourite form of sonnet or nursery rhyme (this does, of course, depend on his temperament).

He’ll probably claim his jumble of overstated imagery and needless italics to be an extended metaphor for contemporary politics later. He’ll probably also nod along absent-mindedly in a decade or so, when some student from The University of Wherevershire points out to him that this letter means this and that word means that. He won’t have intended any of it; no metaphors, no extended meanings, just a silly little game that he managed to make money from. Gillian Clarke is the perfect example of this; at a conference with GCSE students, the poor woman was completely unaware that certain phrases had been translated as metaphors for some of the most bizarre things.

People forget, when studying the usual ’form, structure and language'that, particularly in the olden days, writing was indeed a profession. Much like football pitch construction is today, these workers were expected to meet goals and produce a certain amount of ’product’. Plenty of well respected, classical writers, including Hardy and Dickens, lengthened their stories simply because they were paid by the page, and so the longer the better. Teachers, exam boards and students should remember the next time they look at the use of repetition in ’A Tale of Two Cities'or ’Jude The Obscure’, that the writer was writing for money. They padded their work out almost as if they were trying to fit into the word count, and so perhaps their texts should be read with the sort of critical eye that reviews fluffed out personal statements and rambling coursework.