Recently, a year-11 student said to me that he had got through school to that point without ever having read a poem or been taught a poem. He would not be alone. Poetry suffers from a bad press. It is judged as being difficult, arcane, with hidden meanings somewhere behind obfuscating language.

Then there is fear.

Many teachers are frightened of poetry. They do not understand it and therefore will not teach it. This no-go attitude consolidates the mistaken view that if you present a child with a poem, the result is fear or fleeing to prose.

Many of us can recite at least the first line of A.B. Paterson's bush doggerel The Man from Snowy River ("There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around, that the colt from old Regret had got away, and had joined the wild bush horses – he was worth a thousand pound"), but the malaise over poetry in the classroom is bad pedagogy. It denies children being exposed to language forms that offer innovation and a deep richness of imaginative expression.

This is not a solely Australian or for that matter specifically Victorian issue. In response to what is regarded as an international lack of exposure to poetry, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation has declared March 21 to be World Poetry Day.

The rationale for doing so underscores concerns that poetry may be a dying craft. The purpose of the day is to promote the reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry throughout the world and, as the UNESCO session declaring the day says, "to give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements".

This year marks the centenary of the birth of perhaps the greatest Welsh poet and one of the finest modern poets, Dylan Thomas. It is likely to pass without as much as a ripple, let alone the intense appositeness of his enduring poem The Hand That Signed the Paper, published in 1936.

Others have suffered a similar fate of omission. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney died last year. Would his searing and heart-breaking school poem, Mid-Term Break, from 1966, from the collection Death of a Naturalist, with the resonating line on the death of a child, "A four foot box, a foot for every year", have been taught? Hardly.

Given that poetry is, broadly speaking, not well taught, it is a short step for teachers to assume that modern-day rap is poetry – after all, it rhymes. But to assume that poetry is only the kind of thing that Eminem and others offer is to sell students way short of the glories of language.

It was a point argued by former Poet Laureate and prize-winner Andrew Motion. Writing in London's Daily Telegraph in January 2010, Motion said: "It's very tempting, and especially with students who are already frightened or suspicious of poetry, to coax them towards it by offering them something that appears to speak directly to their experience by choosing a poem about football for a football-loving boy.

"There's nothing wrong with this tactic, provided we recognise that it is only the beginning of the process. If we give students only one kind of poetry to read, it would be like parking someone at the door of a palace and telling them to go no further."

It is hard to see how students of secondary age would not be moved by Sylvia Plath, the stridency of Audre Lorde and the whimsy of Philip Larkin. But sadly these and many poets will not even be presented in class, along with Australian voices such as Les Murray, Judith Wright, A.D. Hope and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

It's not that there is a shortage of poems to offer students; what is lacking is confidence in the teaching of poetry and a palpable lack of preparation in poetry of student teachers with English as their teaching subject. Most student teachers would not offer a poem to a new class.

Still, as critic Ian McFarlane says, "Poetry is the mother tongue of language". English teachers should be, more than anyone, standing up for poetry and expressing their "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light".

Dylan Thomas would have it so.

Christopher Bantick is a senior literature teacher at a Melbourne boys' Anglican Grammar School.