{lime tree}: Enough? Crisis?

There's a discussion going on here about the "Is poetry enough?" event. Not so much the event itself, which I'm sure was extremely worthwhile, but the title and the explanatory justification for this title. I am made nervous by the idea of a "special" role for poetry. As Dave Hess points out in a comment, no other art form is called upon to justify itself in this way. Or, to put it another way: no other art form arrogates to itself the task of being sufficient to solve the world's problems. If only they'd listen to us! The combination of ressentiment and complacency that HG notes in a comment to another post on Lime Tree.

There are two versions of the same fantasy:

1) Poets can abandon their avant-garde pretensions so as to be heard in a larger public sphere.

2) The public can be educated in avant-garde poetics and thus find a politico-cultural salvation.

Yet the underlying fallacy ("unacknowledged legislators" for short) is the same.

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Update. I take all this back. It seems mean-spirited of me to make these points, somehow. I don't know what I really think anymore.