What is snobbery then?

In the song lyrics thread, Missi said:

"For many of these snobs rhyming poetry is considered 'school yard' stuff and not worthy of serious consideration. That is patent rubbish, but I know there are some members here that think that way."

Alan then said:

"I agree - there is a lot of snobbery. People look down their noses at the likes of John Hegley, John Cooper Clark, Lemn Sissay and Benjamin Zephaniah."

I'm not against rhyming poetry - I write a lot of it myself - but I can easily imagine being called a snob on the basis of some of the stuff I don't like. I find it very hard to like, for instance, poetry that follows a strictly metred rhythm without stretching it or playing with it to some extent. I'm not much of a fan of John Cooper Clark or Benjamin Zephaniah, but then, there are plenty of more 'literary' poets I find worse.

Surely, snobbery isn't defined by what you don't like, though, but your attitude towards it. In which case, at what point does a fierce and confident distaste toward something equate to snobbery? Is it when you roll your eyes? I read some poetry recently by someone who had written an essay in the back of his book explaining why he thought metre and rhyme were so important, and how he only read older, classic poets and didn't think of much free verse as real poetry. His own poetry was purely AABBCCDD structured, and didn't even *scan* (ie. for all his emphasis on metre, his lines were of irregular metrical length). He'd also twisted sentences to the point of nonsense in order to get a cliched rhyme out of the last word. My attitude to that is "Give me strength!" So am I being snobbish? And why isn't he being snobbish, when he evidently dismissed poetry so much more readily than me?

Has it something to do with the implication of stupidity on the part of the masses? I know snobbery is often associated with advocates of 'high art' who often bullyishly push forward the view that their pet artists render everyone else's interests/tastes as fads (I've been told, for example, that supporters of the poet Geoffrey Hill are particularly obnoxious in putting him forward as a 'great poet' too clever for the rest of us to 'get'). But surely none of us deny that 'the masses', whatever part of ourselves and each other that constitutes, are responsible for the overlong shelf-life of some pretty incredible shite. So are we all snobs?