Descriptive poetry, really good descriptive poetry, helps us to see the world as it is by describing it as it particularly is not. The red of the rose in the Romantic poem is not "red" per se, but the poet's vision of a particular red - no other rose in the world or in the history of the world has that red. Thus, this "poet's red" enables us to see that a rose is a rose of a color, or of many colors, rather, which we must call "near" or "in the family of." The red of the rose in the world is approximate red. The red of the rose in a poetic description is its own particular red.
When we "see" this rose in a poem, we see an idea of a red rose, and thus we "see" that the red rose of the world is the idea of red and can not be anything but.
We learn this by reading the poems of Marianne Moore, for example, and by looking at the work of the Dutch Golden Age painters - descriptions so particular as to be nearly surreal. It is in this surreal particularity that we are to see the "real" of our world, or portion of our world, in all its proximity.
A good descriptive poem must insist on this surreal particularity.
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