Language is what stops the heart exploding. Or as T.S. Eliot puts it in Murder in the Cathedral, "This is one moment / But know that another / shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy."

When I was growing up poor and Pentecostal in the north of England, books were not allowed in our house, unless they were Bible books or my mother's mystery stories - not of the miracle play kind, but of the Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen kind. My mother made the rules as violently and as eccentrically as any tinpot despot, and my counter-strategies included smuggling books into the house and hiding them under the mattress, or reading them in the public library. Fatefully, when I was 16, and just as she was about to throw me out of the house for ever, for breaking a very big rule (not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex), my mother made a mistake. She sent me to the library to collect her weekly haul of mysteries - and on her list was Murder in the Cathedral.

She thought it was a saga of homicidal monks. In the library, I opened it - it looked a bit short for a mystery story. I hadn't heard of T.S. Eliot, but I read the line about "sudden painful joy" and I started to cry. Readers looked up reproachfully, and the librarian reprimanded me, because in those days you weren't even allowed to sneeze in a library, and so I took the book outside and read it all the way through, sitting on the steps in the usual northern gale.

The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family (I am adopted, so being packed off for a second time was very hard), the confusion of sexuality, and the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat and how to get on with my A-levels.

So when people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said a...