Poets Is Miserable Barstids - How we read

I've been corresponding via facebook recently with a lad who's currently having to study poems by both me and Carol Ann Duffy for AS-level. It's become clear that he and his mates have conceived a poisonous dislike for Duffy's poems, because, he says, the teachers have chosen such "depressing" ones to study. I seem to have escaped lightly, because, though I write at least as many depressing ones as she does, I'm the comparison object in the module and the students can, more or less, choose wh...