'Read poetry: it's quite hard'

Bring back the canon, argues Sean O'Brien, ahead of the Guardian's series on great 20th-century poets

The bright, articulate daughter of some friends of mine is currently taking her A-levels. Among the English set texts are the poems of TS Eliot. The daughter is loud in her dislike of Eliot and unabashed by the horror of those at the dinner table when she makes her views known. Many years ago, when I was doing A-levels, I experienced a similarly powerful dislike of Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews. At the same time, if Eliot had been on the syllabus, I'd have been delighted.

A brilliant English teacher had introduced us to "Preludes", "Prufrock" and "The Journey of the Magi" much lower down the school. What saddens me is that, when my friends' daughter reads Eliot, material that had remained until recently common property among educated people - for example, biblical allusion - is a closed book to her, a difficulty that seems to offer her attention no reward. She is by no means alone.

There are many for whom this problem seems trivial. The word "relevance" looms - that contemporary fetish, so often brandished to mitigate ignorance and justify a failure of curiosity. I would argue that my friends' daughter and many young people like her suffer a loss of liberty when the past is in effect closed down and the present becomes the measure of all things. Such young people have, in effect, no history, and this being so, their own significance is diminished. The problem is not whether Shakespeare or the Bible or TS Eliot is "relevant" to them, but whether they can see themselves as part of a continuum, a community extending across history.

In the later 20th century, as waves of critical theory broke over the academy, the idea of the canon came under attack on the grounds that it was a club for dead white males, that it excluded much other work of value and interest, that it must be dismantled or at any rate radically revised. If you examine the stock of classic and modern fiction in a university bookshop today, supposing you can find one worthy of the name, a good deal of additional material has been brought to light in recent years, often from women or non-white writers. The terms of reference have shifted and expanded. When Eliot himself wrote about literary tradition, he proposed that it is both modified and sustained by the addition of new work - so that the canon is an evolving creation, not something written in stone. It should serve as a gateway rather than a prison or a private club.

The origins of the canon (from the Greek kanon: measure, rule) can be traced back to the establishment of authoritative texts for the Bible. Its application to English literature perhaps really gets under way in the later 18th century with Johnson's Lives of the Poets and Warton's History of English Poetry. As objectors point out, canon formation is necessarily an impure activity, inseparable from the effort to define nationhood. Englishness, given a literary back-story, becomes a measure of difference and superiority: the moral seriousness of a Victorian critic such as Matthew Arnold coexists with imperialism, and Eliot's own thinking was politically reactionary. The saving corollary, though, is that literature is dynamic and perpetually in debate with itself and the times. The canon is a focus of attention; it is not the tables of the law.

The canon also - and here is perhaps a particular source of difficulty - presents a challenge to the reader, of a kind which in our impatient times often produces anxiety and resentment. This is reflected in some of the more desperate marketing moves. Too busy to read a novel? Lacking concentration? Try a bite-size poem. Except that, appearances notwithstanding, a good poem is likely to be as capacious and demanding in its own way as many novels, and to live in the imagination a good deal longer.

The difficulty that readers face owes much to the fundamentally prosaic and utilitarian view of language which dominates our period: speed, impact and "the facts" are pre-eminent. In fact, the deafening roar of the contemporary is as elaborately rhetorical in its way as any other language-use, but just as readers sometimes mistake literary realism for reality, and find non-realist work intolerable in consequence, so they are encouraged to confuse the banal with the actual. As Marx observed: "All that is solid melts into air" - in this case into noise, the Babel of mass disempowerment.

"Read poetry: it's quite hard," the poet Don Paterson crisply suggested. To do so requires us to claim that imaginative space, and to live with Keats's "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts", rather than rush to conclude and summarise. Part of what Eliot called "the shock of poetry" lies in the fact that what it offers is often both instinctively recognisable and at the same time resistant to interpretation - a three-dimensional experience for the imagination, not a mere scanning of captions. And just as poetry's subject is life in all its manifestations, so it exacts from the reader an equal attention to the human gift of language - meaning, tone, overtone, music, pattern, memorability, the power to move and delight.

If such richly complicated but freely available pleasures have come to seem forbidding, then we are indeed in trouble. Autonomy and seriousness come under threat because they represent an obstacle to the progress of the kind of ignorance that prefers to suppose that everything can be consumed, excreted and replaced, that one thing is much like another, and that anyway nobody cares or has time to make their own distinctions. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Walcott and Plath and all the others suggest otherwise. Who would we rather believe? Who would we rather spend our time with? The choice is ours, for the moment.

· On Tuesday the Guardian publishes the first in a series of booklets on Great Poets of the 20th Century, which will include work from TS Eliot, Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath and will be accompanied by an audio CD of the poets reading their work