A couple of (unrelated) notes by Ray Davis suggest to me that in Evans's statements I may be taking what was intended as refusing the terms instead as a pattern of withholding behavior:

Try to reach directly from the alienated individual to the vasty universal and you're apt to sprain something. Instead, poets could escape solipsism by embracing and populating insularity.

Insularity's not quite how I'd put research and collegiality down as line items on my next invoice to the Attention Trust. I will say, though, that it does point at how poetry most successfully turns the head of time...