I was standing by my wife’s head, waiting for the delivery of our second son, the other day, when the anaesthetist asked me, what do you do for a living?

As I told her that I teach English literature, the very polysyllabic quality of that word, ‘literature’, seemed uselessly effete in my mouth. I almost mumbled over it. How dare one speak of literature in such an extremely practical situation?

A few days later, our new baby at home, I began to want to make my habitually grandiose claims for the efficacy of literature again. In fact I found myself making them during a tutorial with a heart surgeon, in the middle of a discussion about Wilfred Owen’s famous poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. I was trying to convince my student that Owen’s poem might not really be a poem at all, although thousands of English teachers will tell you otherwise and it seems to be possible to analyse the text successfully using terms like ‘iambic pentameter’, ‘alliteration’, etc.

Owen himself wrote of his war poems, "I am not concerned with Poetry", which W. B. Yeats understood when he excluded the dead poet from his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Yeats later declared in a letter: "I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst and most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum – however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick...There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him."

Yeats’s argument was that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry".

Was Owen making merely political sandwich-boards and disguising them as poems? People still read poems avidly a hundred years ago and so he could have expected that his message might be heard, and we’re still very much taken in by the disguise today when his poems are read at all, in the classroom or to mark centenaries. Perhaps they are deliberate fakes, or exaggerations of poetry made to excite pity, and Owen knew it. Perhaps it is for that reason that I enjoy teaching them. His poems can function as a foil to true poetry, which is never so partisan, however justified the cause seems.

As 2016 ends and I reflect on all this year’s centenaries, political upheavals and losses, I want to reread polished impolitic poems, not terribly polite works, perhaps even Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, surely one of the greatest poems to come out of the Cotswolds (conceived at Far Oakridge), even if you think of Edward Thomas’s great elegy ‘Adlestrop’ and Ivor Gurney’s sublime work.

I was going to write a paragraph asserting that true poetry is efficacious at a profound metaphysical level. But then I recalled the words of Rowan Williams at the funeral of Geoffrey Hill this year: "He brought something to birth for all of us, by that grace he celebrated, something inescapably ethical", which "comes slowly into focus as a?practice that embodies witness, standing consistently in a?place where something is, however intermittently, clear, and refusing those versions of it that are slanted by transient feeling, 'agendas' of one kind or another, functionalist reduction or aesthetic over-ambition.

"Poetry is a real good, and not the only one."

Hill had his portrait painted before volumes of Yeats and Owen.