When Milton asked his heav'nly Muse (and Sainstbury's flat wrong about elision) to help him justify the ways of God to men, he didn't think he was on a fool's errand. He knew nothing flesh could entirely comprehend the infinite mind of God, but he also knew that he was made in God's image and that God intended people to understand His works and mind sufficiently to win salvation. For Milton, poetry was about, not the mysterious and ineffable, but the quite serious business of eternity. He was wrong in detail--ain't no eternity--but right that there is a real and consequential world out there; that human nature imposes limits on our knowledge and understanding of that world; that, nevertheless, we can know the world in ways that matter, both intellectually and morally; that one of the purposes of poetry (though not of every poem) is to explore and teach that knowledge; and that delight is a both a way and a sign of knowing.
Science, which was just beginning in Milton's time, also stems from delight in understanding. (I heartily recommend Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein.) Postmodernism, which inherited from Marx a belief both in the nearly infinite malleability (read nonexistence) of human nature and in the primacy of political-economic forces in shaping any particular version of that nature, including the things that please us, deeply distrusts both knowledge and delight as socially constructed, as symptoms of "false-consciousness" in any society other than that socialist paradise which somehow awaits us. It's amazing how Christian it is, except that most Christianities (and certainly Milton's) hold that the created world as it is, though fallen, is still essentially good. It isn't a trick.
For postmodernists, it is a trick. That's why Ron Silliman could write
"Like rhyme or the tub-thumping metrics of iambic pentameter, the form [the clean line] insinuates a vision of unmediated & harmonious existence that is patently a lie"; it's why Kasey Mohammad complained that contemporary formalism features "a simultaneously maudlin and journalistic insistence on narrating some wise, poignant, sober ... well, "'truth.'"
Of course there are reasons to distrust delight. Cocaine is delightful for a while. But science, born of delight and wonder, is also an organized way to keep from being permanently fooled. We may not be made in God's image, but we are beginning to learn just how we are made. We are learning that there are rather strict limits to the malleability of human nature. We are learning that there is a biological basis for the relationship between knowledge and delight, and that though fallible, it is in fact a way and a sign of knowing. That we can be wrong is no reason not to delight our readers. It just means we have to be willing to change our minds from time to time, find delight in the change, and delight our readers again.
3:25:11 PM 
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