How much detail in a poem? (7.23.21)

This detail was incorporated into a poem that I read recently:

". . . a tree trunk angles 45° toward sun . . ."

It made me wonder how much of what kind of detail is right for a poem, how much is too much (that is, overwritten, or unnecessary)?  I no longer have the poem, so can't provide context for the passage I just quoted.  But within the passage itself you can see there's more detail than a poem might need to make a simple descriptive point: a tree leans into the sun.

And so I have questions about the content of the passage:

• Why the granular particularity of 45° ?
• Why the geometrical language of "angles"?
• Why the attitudinal language of "toward"?
• Why the focus on the tree trunk, and not the tree in totality?

And another question: Is this a case of amount or appropriateness?  Answers will depend, of course, on that missing context, the poem from which this passage is lifted.  The context might tell you whether the writer is thinking about science and technology in relation to nature, for some rhetorical purpose; about objective fidelity to a visual image, a camera-like rendering; or an interest in technical jargon as material for poetry.

You'll recall the great conceit in the Donne poem, "The Compass," where two lovers are compared to the legs of the map-drawing instrument, one still at the center, the other in motion around it.  Or the wonderful reference in the Herrick poem, "Upon Julia's Clothes," to the scientific process of liquefaction, a novel technical concept in the 17th Century, and certainly a novel word for a poem.

But I preserved the passage probably because it appeared to serve no special rhetorical or art-material purpose.  It likely answered a desire to be specific, particular, as we are schooled in the writing of poetry.  As I recall, the poem was not composed as a catalog where the sheer piling up of detail is part of the plan.  Nor was it a conceit that somehow linked mathematical concepts/jargon to thought and feeling, again, not a plan.  Other instances of concrete language--that is, what the writer had seen in a landscape and wished to convey descriptively--probably offered only their individual concreteness, but did not connect with each other through some plan or idea about the overall effect of the poem's imagery and language.  The poem was, I seem to remember, an accumulation of poetically unrelated figures.

"A tree leans into the sun" is clearly more musical than "a tree trunk angles 45° toward sun."  The first image is not less particular than the second.  So what is the value of the extra, specifically technical language?

I suspect (but only suspect) that the writer "heard" concreteness of detail in that choice of words . . . a good thing to hear, generally, when you're crafting a poem.  But the writer did not revise for "wholeness" or "unity" or "integration" of idea, image, thought and feeling, language.  He or she merely wandered from one expression to another, one image to another, in an attempt to describe a scene "objectively."  That may be nature, but it is not art.