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According to Shklovsky, the essential function of poetic art is to counteract the process of habituation encouraged by routine everyday modes of perception.  We very readily cease to "see" the world we live in, and become anaesthetized to its distinctive features.  The aim of poetry is to reverse that process, to defamiliarize that with which we are overly familiar, to creatively deform the usual, the normal, and so to inculcate a new, childlike, non-jaded vision in us.  The poet thus aims to disrupt "stock responses, " and to generate a heightened awareness: to restructure our ordinary perception of reality, so that we end by seeing the world instead of numbly recognizing it. . .

--terence hawkes structuralism and semiotics via ann lauterbach the night sky: writings on the poetics of experience [viking; 2005]