Debate over which poetic works should be permitted to be read in high school English classes is of great concern to school board members, administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Poetry is censored primarily for three reasons: sexual content, spiritual beliefs and practices, and human psychology. Would-be censors claim that teachers select such material not for whatever artistic merit it possesses, but instead for its sensationalism and its ability to cause students to question the values taught by parents.

Challenges to poetry on the basis of its sexual content often center on treatments of premarital or extramarital sex. Censors and would-be censors have objected to poems that portray such acts favorably, or that fail to condemn such acts, or that simply in telling about such acts, focus on issues other than their moral wrongness. Anne Sexton’s “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward” is an example. Some poems are banned on the basis of subtle genital-related symbolism as well as for more overt depiction of coition. Poems involving some type of sexual violence—rape, spouse abuse, molestation—are also objectionable to many people, especially since such poems usually cast women as victims. William Butler Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan” and Robert Lowell’s “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” are two such poems.

In other cases, poetry has been banned for descriptions or suggestions of prostitution, incest, or homosexuality. Twentieth century poetry is particularly susceptible to attack on these grounds, as these issues are central to the twentieth century quest for meaning through sexual encounters. T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and Adrienne Rich’s “The Floating Poem,” are among those frequently banned. Each of these poets is a primary figure in a period or school of poetry, so censoring their poems raises questions about a student’s ability to draw intelligent conclusions about entire categories of poetry.

Censorship on the basis of spirituality frequently involves banning poets’ entire canons or excluding whole movements. Censors target as pagan poetry that recalls or relies on Greek or Roman mythology; such poetry does not uphold Christian values. This argument extends to other mythological constructs, including the occultist work of W. B. Yeats and the Transcendental poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Poems by Emerson (a Christian minister) and others have been found especially objectionable by some because of the Eastern ideas upon which they are based.

Yet more ironic is censorship aimed at the poetry of Christian poets who struggle with the precepts of the Christian religion in order to come to terms with issues of personal faith. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), for example, which states that it seeks “to justify the ways of God to man,” may be denounced as portraying sin and disbelief, because in the poem, Adam and Eve sin and Satan rebels. Although Milton’s book is considered quite conservative by most, the very presence of spiritual doubt and speculation about the mercy of the Christian God is sufficient cause for others to push for its exclusion from high school curricula.

People who resist any questioning of religious faith especially object to many works of the late Victorian and early modern periods. Thomas Hardy (who was educated with an eye to the priesthood) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (an ordained Jesuit priest) are two British poets who express the despair that resulted from a society’s theological underpinning being thrown into doubt by scientific advances. The kind of spiritual agony that Hopkins depicts in his “terrible sonnets,” for example, is anathema to some censors. Those who argue for the...