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It is not a continuation of discourse with which the reader is already familiar, such as a newspaper, a romance novel, or a scholarly article. Virtually any other type of text seems to be connected, by virtue of its content, to other, already familiar texts, addressing them to some extent but offering some new content as well. Often, as with an experimental novel, the content confounds our expectations, but at least we bring specific expectations to the reading process. This is why even many of my fellow graduate students in English said, “I don’t get poetry.”
Poetry has nearly always defined itself as giving voice to language and music from a transpersonal source, but it has not always been as inhospitable to readers as it became in the last hundred years. This change occurred with the withdrawal of the poet from the poem, and culminated with the Language Poets, whose style and aleatory methods represent the ultimate attempt at withdrawal. With the abandonment of any transcendentalist conceits, these poets explicitly describe the political motives behind their formal experiments. They stand in an odd relationship to the neo-Romantic postmodern poets, whose political aims resulted from their aesthetic goals rather than motivating them.
Such an explicit and worldly purpose is highly unusual in British or American poetry. Sidney’s Defense, coming as it did at the early modern or early humanist era, encompasses the various forms of spiritual or religious belief that had always surrounded Anglophone poetry: