So what occurs to me, thinking about "Swamp Formalism"?

The reiterations ("as if. . .") - a Whitman technique, drawn originally from Biblical Psalms & prophetic books.

The concept of Donald Rumsfeld as a proponent of "swamp formalism" - the general idea of repressive/oppressive/repressed Order or (patriarchal - "men") Establishment, evolving into this Darwinian epitome (Rumsfeld) the "poet" of War news conferences. (Along with a glancing jab at all the "forms" of glaciated & crystallized & neo-conservative traditionalist or reactionary Poetry.)

This concept, combined with the neo-Romantic/Beat stance of Poet as apolitical Dreamer or anti-Establishment Rousseauiste innocent (Blakean-Ginsbergian) - which requires an identification with all things - including Rumsfeld : hence the (somewhat convenient, & perhaps hypocritical) ambiguity of the Odyssean-Edenic scenario. (ie. the speaker can imagine Rumsfeld only as a primitive lizard-aggressor - but the act of imagining is, at the same time, an ethical act, an expression of empathy - & thus a recognition of "common humanity": sinful, mortal - the "main dust").

This is fine. But my main thought, here in the main dust, is as follows:
That in a democratic culture, there is, in the poetry world anyway, a kind of unintentionally comic coincidentia oppositorum. Rebel pop avant-garde New American poetics becomes as mandarin-effete (an exact mirror-image) as the high-culture traditionalist poetry that it once rebelled against. How so? Just as with the arch-aestheticism & art-for-art's-sake of the Symbolists & Pre-Raphaelites 125 years ago, there is now an autonomous, pseudo- or semi-professional poetry culture, which requires a special dialect (a special poetic diction) of political-spiritual-social opposition. Within this subculture, it is not necessary anymore to come to terms with ethical, political, or philosophical dilemmas - to work them out, logically and rhetorically - by means of a lingua franca et jocundissima or vulgar tonggue. In other words, one need not "reason" with the public, or with the enemy : neo-post-romantic-postmodernism merely requires that the poet find a rhetorical "subjective correlative" - a Blakean baby-riff.