Certainly not from the same source, no (though as I remember at the time when the media were complaining a lot about "fat cat" inflated rewards to executives, none did so louder or more insistently than the Mail. To no effect of course.  (My reading of the Mail and similar products is, you understand, restricted to front pages in supermarket racks). What was I going to say?

I'm concerned about class-labelling, justified as most of it is, being made to cross borders into cultural production. To say "poetry is an overwhelmingly middle-class pursuit"  (which may be true or not, I don't have any way of knowing) is not the same as saying that the poetry produced is middle-class poetry. I might even be prepared to invoke ideas of transcendence here. Certainly some poetry such as Larkin's is, most of it, heavily loaded with a lower-middle-class self-depiction, quite defiantly sometimes. But is there such a thing as middle /or low/ class poetical form, or aesthetics, or philosophy? Much peddled lower-class or educational poetry is distinctly easy on the brain, (avoids multi-layering, big words, remote references etc etc., Armitage for instance when he is being like that) ) -- is this actually definitive of lower-class understanding? I hope not.In fact I know it's not.  AT this point I usually suggest that people go away and read Mrs Gaskell's North and South. 

Or consider places such as the one i live in, which since the 1970s have been through large influxes of "bohemian" or "hippie" settlement which have thoroughly complicated class divisions, in many cases the children of middle-class/educated parents, themselves ex-university, living on very low incomes and taking on all sorts of menial work and becoming quite indistinguishable in the end from local/working-class/natives.  Including poets. Michael Haslam for instance, a particularly fine poet in an idiom affected by both JH Prynne and Lancashire ballads and monologues (at times). Or Jim Burns contrariwise. Or Steve Ely. Or the many people of my generation who gained access to higher education and thus middle-class poetry culture (in my case upper?) through Labour post-war educational policies  (now stopped of course) and are now mixed-up old kids. 

I wrote a long review on these topics called "Working Class Poetry" for The fortnightly Review which can be found in their website if anyone wants to, or in the book.

PR