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Poets and their warmest admirers tend in general to oppose the taxonomization of poetry. For them, taxonomy is a form of cultural fascism with little redeeming value. It robs whatever it's applied to of all its beyond-words magic, and straitjackets creativity. What's more, it can't even successfully do what it's supposed to do: classify. Proof of this is the difficulty many scholars are still having with such questions as whether certain highly "poetic" texts that lack line-breaks ("prose poems") are prose or poetry.
Needless to say, as a long-time literary taxonomaniac, I have a low opinion of this prejudice against taxonomy: it's just the kind of thing you'd expect from people who, capable only of sensual appreciation of art, have no use for the conceptual appreciation that taxonomy is the basis of. Or who have political or psychopathological reasons for preventing the clarification of discussion that an effective taxonomy can accomplish.
True, a taxonomy can be, and too often is, used to reduce the variety and width of the courses taught at colleges or of what's considered for anthologies or galleries or critical studies; but that is not the fault of taxonomy, which can as easily be used to prove what's missing from university departments, anthologies, and the like; it is the fault of the rigidniks who use taxonomy as a weapon against loss of dominance rather than as a tool of understanding. The anti-taxonomists should oppose the rigidniks, not taxonomy.
As for the mystico-romantic idea that taxomization will ruin one's experience of any art, I say it's baloney. At their best, taxonomies (and analysis in general) reveal ever-smaller mysteries, and ever-vaster interconnections to discover down or up to--while allowing us a vocabulary greater than "oooh" and "ahhh" with which to share our pleasure with others. At their worst, they're correctable--and will only "straitjacket" would-be poets who lack the strength of character to ignore defective or limiting definitions--or the intelligence to understand that the aim of definitions and taxonomies is to facilitate appreciation, not direct composition.
The idea that taxonomizing is a waste of time because of the way every taxonomy inevitably breaks down at the borders of its compartments is similarly stupid: the existence of tidal marshes does not prove the uselessness of distinguishing land from ocean.
Conclusion: to be against the taxonomization of poetry is to be against the use of the brain, and against the full appreciation of existence.
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