[...] poetry, as Terry Eagleton argues, 'is something which is done to us, not just said to us. The meaning of its words is closely bound up with the experience of them.' The separation of truth from the materiality of language is a product of modernity, linguistic specialisation, and a specifically capitalist division of labour. But as a result of this division, a prejudice has emerged which regards any accentuation of the aesthetic, sensuous properties of language, outside the relatively harmless sphere of entertainment, as a frivolous obstacle to understanding. At best an indulgence, at worst manipulative. In its left-moralist iteration, this prejudice can take the form of the claim that 'fancy' prose is 'elitist', 'exclusive', evading comprehension by 'real people'.

[...] These days, such covert snobbery often comes from graduate students, guiltily devouring Baudrillard on the down-low while earnestly masticating gruel-thin versions of Marxism for the gratuitously patronised and underestimated readers of the revolutionary press: the negative ideographs of the TheoryBro.

There is, deposited in this ideology of 'clarity', a crude theory of pedagogy. According to this view, difficulty and obstacles to the most 'straightforward' comprehension are inevitably blocks which any normal human will simply find discouraging - rather than, perhaps, tantalising invitations to learn and grow. As thought the ideal learner has no desire to be challenged, beyond the reading of an alphabetti-spaghetti version of any given issue. In many ways, obstacles are what pedagogy thrives on: the fact that something suggests a mystery but doesn't immediately yield to understand is what creates a desire to know more.