Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mass-print-generated, along with the railways, telegraph, information-relays national and global, and the gradual development of specialized and sometimes incommunicable forms of technological, scientific, economic, and medical knowledge, a sea of discourse belying Jurgen Habermas's vision of a cogent 'public sphere.' The author's interest is in a special problem that poetry and poetics can help us understand. In short – because, when they appear in verse, claims about reality have been characterized, or have self-characterized, as unreal, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry has repeatedly returned to, and tried to make perceptible, other ways in which, in other precincts, utterance becomes, in his word, virtualized. Sometimes, by the psychological turbulences of the citizen-as-creature, appropriating world-events to the need to self-assert; sometimes, as a result of affective matrices that put the lie to the idea that we are the authors of our own opinions.