We are senior students of the art of ‘language charged with meaning’ who finesse our judgments about the extent to which a poet may have deployed the best words in the best order. We admire the skill a wordsmith has drawn on to rhyme without ostentation, to sense the rhythm appropriate for the moment, to ambiguate enigmatically, to disclose, revealingly, an apt image; we are alert to adventurous alliteration, we hanker after the heft and weight of a handsome hendiadys, we are entranced by a trenchant tricolon, and love anaphora that lingers in the imagination and the memory. 

Bring on the bards! for we cannot bear to be without them: we would be diminished, and our lives would be without form, and void, and beset by darkness and an unsettling of the understanding stillness poetry offers