But then, the Bard of Salford was no William Wordsworth.
John Cooper Clarke looked like Bob Dylan refashioned from pipe cleaners - all spidery legs, impenetrable shades and savagely teased hair.
An ex-mod with years of small-time club work under his belt, he surged to prominence on the New Wave, adopted by an audience he probably never fully understood but could identify with through its thirst for brutal honesty.
Clarke at the height of his popularity opened shows for some of punk's premier acts, later aligning himself with others such as The Fall, New Order and Be-Bop Deluxe.
Also a headline act, he was signed by CBS in 1978 and released Disguise In Love, the first of four major-label albums he would complete before falling from favour in the early '80s.
The albums paired him with backing outfit The Invisible Girls, built around Joy Division producer Martin Hannett and keyboardist Steve Hopkins.
The Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley was another to regularly feature.
In Disguise In Love the band creates a strange soup of sub-aquatic gurgling mixed with spiky New Wave tunes, all designed to slow Clarke's masterful ranting down to a manageable pace for foggy-headed Sunday-morning listeners.
Through dynamic, hilarious wordplay that calls on influences from pop culture, pulp sci-fi and surrealism, Clarke paints a picture of a postwar Britain immersed in suburban sleaze and obsessive pastimes.
In Readers' Wives the brassy brides of Britain with flesh the colour of potatoes put down their knitting at the doorway to our dismal daily lives.
In Health Fanatic a hyperactive nutter fights a one-man war against decay.
It's all designed to prove that well-worn northern adage: There's nowt so queer as folk.
