Jonathan Mayhew asks good questions:
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Isn't poetry a genre of fiction?
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Was Yeats' problem that he believed [his fictional schemes] literally?
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Why don't we have serious theological debates about the existence of Osiris?
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Can I keep Blake?
Well, he didn't really ask to keep Blake; he insisted. Happily, the short answer to that question is "yes." Long answers follow.
Poetry just isn't a kind of fiction, though some poems do imitate the form of actions which no one, including the author, believes to have actually occurred. Milton certainly didn't think he was writing fiction, even though he invented details of his story, and I doubt Yeats would have described his retellings of Irish myth or even his Crazy Jane poems as fiction. Wordsworth wrote autobiography. I have no idea how to describe the relation of Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris to fiction or, for that matter, to poetry, and Marjorie Perloff doesn't help. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is probably fiction, though allegory is an uncomfortable fit with current literary theory—of course, it wouldn't be the first time literary theory was, to be polite, less than adequate.
Yeats' problem wasn't that he held incorrect beliefs which he then expressed in poems: in fact, as a metaphorical structure for what he did in his poetry, they work pretty well. But those same beliefs also severely limited just what he could do. Since they were largely based on a private vision (mostly his wife's construct), they could not be as ample as what was available to Milton, necessarily excluding large parts of our experience, and they required explanation themselves before they could be used to explain anything else. The first part of "The Second Coming" suffers from the latter problem. The former manifests itself in almost every line of his work: the physical world, even sex, is reduced to a collection of signs—"O Solomon, let us try again!"—and despite his lifelong involvement in politics in an age of extraordinary political change, despite living through some of the most exciting developments in our scientific understanding of the world, very little in his poetry would have been out of place a hundred years before his birth.
Belief based on some private or revealed source is a poor way to knowledge precisely because it is not subject to debate or experiment. How can it change except through revelation, and how can revelation be tested? What purpose would be served by debating the existence of Osiris? Or of Allah? Yahweh? Engrams? Cthulthu? Believers point to their private experience or to sacred texts that contradict the sacred texts of other kinds of believers, and afterward nothing has changed—unless they've killed one another.
Now, the core of what Milton believed to be true was based on revelation, but by happy accident a piece of that revelation was that we were made in the image of the creator. A long tradition identified reason as the part so made, and also accepted the world as The Book of Nature, a second revelation available for study and understanding. Of course, we could not know the world perfectly as God knew it, but our reason was a kind of shadow of the mind of God—the debate over angels dancing on the head of a pin was really concerned with how far the difference was in kind rather than degree.
Milton was the last major poet in English to have the faith that we could learn truth about the world through observation of the world more reliably than through introspection. For him, though, it was a matter of faith, and where the Book of Nature appeared to contradict the Bible, he chose the Bible. But now we know that a creature which cannot accurately interpret the world will not place its genes in the next generation. Our descriptions are not perfect and will probably never be complete (neither, for Milton, was the understanding of faith), but they do describe a real and knowable world. Denying that denies our humanity.
Hey, I do remember that I said we poets were just entertainers. I was listening last week to Terri Gross interviewing Colin Quinn. I don't remember the question, but Quinn's answer (paraphrased) was "If I can't tell the truth, what kind of comedian am I? That's our job—to tell the truth—and, you know, make it funny."
Jonathan, do you really want Blake's prophetic poetry?
Update: via the indispensable Arts and Letters Daily, a review in Evolutionary Psychology of Arnold Weinstein's A Scream Goes Through The House, titled "Literature Teaching Us About Life, and vice versa."
6:36:22 PM 
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