One gets the feeling that Dawkins might be a bit irritable around poetry. Does he have kids? Does he stubbornly refuse to read them anything fanciful? What a buzzkill.
Everything has it's use... obviously, science is useless without it's very structured thinking, but human beings need whimsy and irrationality, even. They can coexist very nicely as long as there's a conscious recognition where one starts and the other ends.