Another blog-range response to Jonathan :

Lake's outline of the effect of lineation, syntax and meter in poetry in this particular essay is clear, simple to the point of simplistic, bare-bones, basic, unoriginal, and accurate. I don't see anything particularly Victorian about it, maybe because I'm a Victorian?

But what interested me about it was that the analysis of poetry came through a description of fiction & narrative - how the minds of writer & reader "dream" & evoke the mimetic signals in the text. He points out how the mind shapes "wholes" (in a "fractal", recursive expansion) out of these minimal but subtle & delicate language signals. This really is an area which I think you can make the argument has been dealt with mainly through disruption, "dis-figurement", in postmodern poetics.

My own interest has been engaged in the composition of long semi-narrative poems in which story & landscape & character "appear" in surprising ways, which experience makes me think there is more to be discovered through such synthetic rather than disjunctive processes.