There's a delightful moment in Mel Brooks' 1974 movie Blazing Saddles where the lead antagonist 'that's Hedley' Lamarr (Harvey Korman) presents Lili von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn spoofing Marlene Dietrich) with a bouquet of flowers. She takes it, looks at it, says 'Oh how —' and, after a perceptible pause throws it aside, adding 'ordinawy'.

I couldn't help feeling much the same while trawling through a few dozen of the most recently posted items on Poetry Daily. The site supposedly selects 'the best and most interesting' from published contemporary poetry, so I dread even trying to imagine the works that failed to pass muster. This is not to denigrate Poetry Daily. It must select from what's available, and almost all online collections I've seen suffer from the same defect. The overwhelming majority of modern published poetry seems dead boring. Its subject matter is generally either so banal or so obscure that it were presented as prose, I wouldn't bother to finish reading it.1

To state the obvious, as is all literature, poetry is fundamentally a vehicle for the communication of ideas. Consequently, the most important requirement of a poem is that the idea should be worth the effort of both transmitting and receiving. Of course that presupposes that in any given case the intent actually is to communicate an idea to others. There are several alternative intents, including really writing for oneself as some kind of catharsis, which is quite legitimate, although publishing the results might be considered questionable. Or, and possibly less legitimately, writing to maintain one's status as a 'poet'. I recently found a poet's 'bio' in which they stated that they have, as a matter of routine, written ten poems a day, every, day for years (admitting generously that it's not all good).

Or thirdly (at worst) writing for the 'cognoscenti' – becoming a poets' poet – a member of a supercilious private mutual back-scratching club that looks down from an enormous height on the ordinary reader as a 'philistine' and rigorously excludes or extrudes from membership anyone who fails to conform to its arbitrary but cast-iron standards.

Sadly, such cliques are a well-established phenomenon in the Western intellectual culture and they each have their shibboleths 2 to keep out the 'masses'. G. K. Chesterton's 1908 essay Demagogues and Mystagogues 3 describes beautifully an approach that's been widely adopted in the 'Arts' – pundits expounding, not with the 'wish to make people understand' but 'to make them painfully aware of not understanding'.

So banality and obscurity may be the current shibboleths of poets' circles. But if we're writing to be read by others, it's just common courtesy not to bore the pants off them. There's a cluster of ancient subjects that have resonated continuously and consistently with humans for millennia – personal experiences of love and loss; life and death; pain and joy; conflict and resolution; nature's beauties and dangers. So why is modern poetry so barren of such themes? I'm pretty sure it's a matter of fashion, which of course has no regard for the personal preferences of those who subscribe to it – its brief is solely to enforce conformity.

I see the same in other spheres – it's not unique to poetry. A few years ago I gave a talk on the representation of nature (ornament including symbols of living things) in London's architecture. I found that, around the mid 1920s, such ornament seemed disappear in favour of abstract forms, and subsequently no ornament at all. Ultimately, in architecture we've finished up, via conscientious brutalism, with raw functionality shorn of any decoration or consideration of proportion (or sometimes even practicality) as long as the result is novel.

Buildings are first and foremost mundanely functional, so even if they're ugly or awkward they can still be used. But poetry has only its message and aesthetic. Our increasing societal detachment from the symbolism with which we have evolved as a species for maybe half a million years may seem innovative, but it inevitably flattens our emotional responses. So the absence of deep human feeling in modern poetic works may merely be an outcome of this more general societal detachment. But it almost certainly renders those works lacking in durability. We should remember that innovative basically means untried, and for poetry the only truly valid trial is the test of time. But in the meantime, we unfortunately have to trawl through all of what's dumped on us in case we might find, with luck, a few rare exceptions.

 [1] I'm apparently not alone in finding this. Here's a quote from a 1979 book review by the Literary Review (admittedly about prose): 'The centre of interest in these annual volumes is always the unfamiliar rather than the established writers. On this occasion the former are very disappointing anyway: a characteristic piece of dreary free-associating from Burroughs ; two pretentious and sentimental fables by Buzzati; and the usual flashy banalities in a story by Moorcock. [para] Of the less well-known names Elspeth Davie contributes a disappointingly prosaic description of an encounter between a young street artist and an elderly customer.'

 [2] Interesting word: 'shibboleth'. Its current usage derives from the Biblical Book of Judges, Chapter 12. After the defeat of the tribe of Ephraim by the people of Gilead, it was used as a spoken password when sorting out Ephraimite refugees from the general population, being a word that the Ephraimites supposedly couldn't pronounce correctly.

 [3] in G K. Chesterton, All Things Considered, Methuen & Co 1908