The body of poetic forms

The following is an excellent bit at the end of an unbelievably rich book, a book that does nothing less than overthrow some of the most tired assumptions that we have when approaching poetry, making the latter seem fresh (a sort of addictive feeling, the feeling one always gets when returning and really significantly reinterpreting a poem, seeing something wholly new about it, or experiencing it from a completely different angle). Or, rather, it is a book that, despite its density and depth, gives us back something entirely simple: something of a sense of poetry (and especially poetic form's) fundamental intuitiveness (or, perhaps more fundamentally, sensuousness). This prompts us to cut through the nostalgia and even the irony and simply take it up again:

Marx had hoped that over time new human senses would develop; he never seemed to have imagined that entire spheres of sense experience might be lost for many first-world people: a tacit knowledge of tools and forms of dancing or of carrying infants, the disappearance of ways of living with animals or cultivating plant life, along with the smell and feel and sounds and even tastes that accompanied such practices; the sound of wind in uninhabited spaces; the weight of ripe things not yet harvested. These experiences are gone, and even their names will soon be gone. The historical body of poetic forms is more and more an archive of lost sensual experiences; by now an aura of nostalgia accrues around the notion of the poetic itself. It was a mistake of humanism to assume that nature exists for us. But it has been just as serious a mistake to have forgotten that the made world, the world of culture, is made by and for us. [...] The entire enduring accomplishment of the history of poetic forms awaits as a vast repertoire for anyone who hopes to enter again into an engagement with the senses.
-Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 332-3