[...] I, too, dislike it: That “too” in the Moore is important—poet and reader of poetry are united in a suspicion of the song of any “earthly poet,” and that suspicion is the ground for an intuition of the ideal. The hatred of poetry is internal to the art, because it is the task of the poet and poetry reader to use the heat of that hatred to burn the actual off the virtual like fog.

Great poets as different as Keats and Dickinson express their contempt for merely actual poems by developing techniques for virtualizing their own compositions—by dissolving the actual poem into an image of the Poem literary form cannot achieve. [...]