[...] a large part of the appeal of the defense as a genre is that it is itself a kind of virtual poetry—it allows you to describe the virtues of poetry without having to write poems that have succumbed to the bitterness of the actual. Which is not to say that defenses never cite specific poems, but lines of poetry quoted in prose preserve the glimmer of the unreal; to quote the narrator of my first novel who is here describing an exaggerated version of my own experience: “I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.”