Poetry publicizes the hearth. The fictional public sphere disregards the intimacy of personal place. Our habits of thought and our small acts of attention are treated with utter indifference by a market invested only in its ability to generate more wealth for those with the most. The rest of us stand slack-jaw as the wealthy continue the fiction and we react with despair or rage or consent. But back home, by the hearth, children arrive. Plants pop out each spring. We live and die with a complex need to define private space against the encroachments of the social welfare state. Poetry argues for the privacy of our thoughts, obsessions, and desires. It publicizes our dreams and our common predicaments as individuals at odds with social institutions.

Except for the divide-and-conquer we-they list at the end, this essaylet by Dale Smith provokes, but usefully.

It's not just Dale, there's a lot of divide-and-conquer on the electrons everywhere lately.