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.
In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it but truth is a point of view and so is changeable.
