I think that animals aren't less intelligent than humans they're just of a different intelligence. We have five million smell-sensitive cells in our nose they have two hundred and fifty million - they can smell emotion. They can smell different types of emotion they just have another type of intelligence.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen a lot of them will.