its trenchant edge is somewhat blunted by the passage of time

Copernicus was calling on his contemporaries to perform the sort of gestalt-like switch our minds can make when we look at an Escher drawing

Ortega y Gasset proclaimed the exhaustion of the picaresque novel since all of the options for plot lines had been used up

texts which were once thought to represent Truth or History increasingly came to be described as simulacra of representation

pulp science fiction from the thirties can be read to limn the prejudices, fears, hopes, and other attitudes prevalent in the years leading up to WWII

our inability to step outside of our own Welantschauung is precisely what makes everything appear to be going in multiple directions at once

the diachronic construct of those feelings in sequence, in action

An oily dandy with great hair

Thus the poetic soul: self-serving and macho as any literary bwana

that's why everybody should pay attention to it: because everybody's fighting about it. It is a culturally cathected term.