Inquiry, finally, is intrusive. It slides into impacted formations of social and public experiences that will seek to divert or receive the intruding gesture, but such spaces do not accept the critical gesture easily. Perhaps this is why poetry provides an opportune genre of linguistic inventiveness and moral certitude. Poetry plays into a contradictory public imagination of the art’s power to produce revolution or voiced dissent. Poetry can put forward the affective possibilities that motivate existing situations.

– from the “Afterword: Poetry as a Modality of Rhetoric in Modernist Inquiry” in Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 by Dale M. Smith