Anastasios, I agree with you that there are powerful cultural & political forces on the Right in the US that employ, both consciously & unconsciously, forms of mythological thinking that overlap a kind of literal-magical sense of scriptural Christianity, with obedience to the state (in this case right-wing Republicans who manipulate those very mythologies).

On the other hand I don't agree with you that these forces simply "run" America, nor that they are uniform & merely simplistic in their attitudes themselves (I mean the fundamentalists). In a real sense the left-academic worldview is out of touch with religious AND political culture in the US, & suffers from mythologies of its own.

One of them being that Bush et al. (because they are capitalist fundamentalists) MUST have an evil plan for world domination, that we are simply repeating the Vietnam War in Iraq, that all the anti-war propaganda is the moral high ground, etc.etc.

It's a hopeless task trying to formulate the perfect political position, because perfection is actually getting away from it all, perfection is going into the mountains & fleeing the beehive & the anthill, perfection is becoming a hobo, perfection is returning to childhood, when you understood instinctively the surrounding nest & neighborhood, & the outside world (mediated by tales of adventure & images of rough reality) was only a dream you imagined, before you grew up & walked eyes closed toward your image of adventure.

My sense of poetry, I think, comes from this experience of a happy & boring & too-secure suburban childhood, which, while you still inhabited it, instilled in you (through fleeting images & fiction & stories) a thirst & a desire to go out into the rougher, wilder, more real world : and then your discovery a little later that fictions & representations were artificial creations too, that the "real world" was rougher & more chaotic & painful than those images of adventure had been. Then poetry made its appearance. & this is why Hart Crane's formulation of the Bridge symbol seems so apt to me - poetry encapsulates a surrender to wildness & the unknown WITHIN words. But not a total surrender - it's both a surrender & a report from that region, thus a bridging action. Poetry is impulsive speech, like a glossolalia, like a response to unbearable pressure - pressure too strong for the constructs of ideology or the plotted atmosphere & stage-craft of fiction.

So poetry is a kind of charismatic or epileptic or orgasmic response to the failure of artificial fictions of the world. This is an aspect of poetry that strikes me in poets like Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Mandelstam. Of course poetry has its Apollonian side too, the aspect of wit, harmony & intellectual elegance. But the Dionysian element is just as powerful, & it plays against prose of all kinds.

Among other effects, this is what underlies the appeal of really good descriptive poetry. You are getting a symbiosis of effects : Dionysian escape combined with the pure joy of questing into a larger landscape of the real world. Crane was right : the hobo has the key.

(p.s. I reckon the Taoist & Zen poets of East Asia knew something about this.)