Discourse about poetry will be placed as central, rather than poetry itself, and necessarily and inescapably both discourse and poetry will be valued which require further academic processing above poetry (and discourse) which do not.
"...most of these [instrumental students] here are not here to study music; they're here to pursue careers. They're not interested in music; they're interested in careers in music." - Milton Babbitt, from,
Milton Babbitt: A Discussion in 12 Parts - 1. Conservatories, New Music, and that term "Classical Music" http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=32fp01
Will anything be read, listened to, looked at, etc., by any sizeable number of people, without some form of secondary discourse to somehow attract their interest?
"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
"Small minds", that means those discourse-sodden academics.
Of course interest in secondary discourse is valuable when it's required by interest in the primary topic/material. There's no denying the extent to which one can be interested in the personality which has produced something interesting and in the historical and social settings in which it was produced. But isn't secondary discourse usually easier than primary, and didn't the scholars and thinkers of the past tend to, necessarily, subsume the secondary in the primary?
