As I write this, on an InterCity Express racing through snowy Austria, my gaze is repeatedly drawn to the woman sitting opposite me. Her mini-skirt and thigh boots create an eccentric ensemble with her deeply wrinkled pensioner's face. She holds the headphones of an old-fashioned Walkman tight against her ears as if to squeeze even closer to an experience that leaks out, anyway, in the high notes of an operatic aria. It must be on maximum volume. Her eyes are closed; her expression is shockingly private. Who's to say why she's moved – or why by Guiseppe Verdi? The point is that she must listen to the thing itself – the moving soundscape that takes her with it as it happens – in order to be so moved. She doesn't have this ecstatic expression because she's thinking about the opera. She's listening: recreating each number as it's recreated in her in a boundary- less to-and-fro between her pleasure and the pleasurability of the music. Clearly and overwhelmingly, her experience has ‘meaning’ and, though I don't share her feelings about Verdi, I know for myself what that is like. (And so, I suspect, do you.)

Tastes vary: mine from yours, and both of ours from day to day. What I fancy for supper tonight may not be what I fancy tomorrow. You tell me your favourite poem is Rudyard Kipling's ‘If’, and I find this inexplicable. Something tells us that this mutable criterion, taste, isn't quite enough when it comes to thinking about poetry or music. We feel resistance to the equality between choices that it suggests. Our experience is more wholehearted than this. In the contemporary poetry world, commitment to any particular school of poetics tends to be treated as an ethical virtue or failing. The language poetry uses about itself in reviewing and puffery bears this out. Terms like ‘authentic’, ‘searching’, and of course the notorious ‘teaches us what it is to be human’, are common currency.

And it's not just ‘professional’ indulgence. We all tend to listen to music, and read poems, as if they are (or are not) true to something.