Permanance and Change

"Piety is the sense of what goes with what."
"Vulgarity is pious."
"[...]the poet, writing of night, puts together all those elements which are his night-thoughts, the things that go wtih night as he knows it [....]"

And what if we draw this out further? That all poets writing of night put together elemnts which are night-thoughts, night as we know it. Because in order for the poem to act upon its readers, there must be some consensus of meaning, some agreed upon set of terms for communication to happen. Night is X and X, we say together, goes with Y. And Z. And Other Letters.

All night poems then would have the same piety. Is this not the same as a genre convention? If, as Burke says, we can fully expect the "villain of a bad drama" to "speak in sibilants," and, as he said in Counter-Statement expectations are what occurs from recurring forms does not piety result in form, eventually?

But when can we say that a generally accepted notion of the pious linking "Villains wear trenchcoats or capes" becomes a formal quality of some larger form, such as "melodrama?" Can a single piety constitue a whole form (genre)? Or must several pieties "in constellation" (Miller) create the genre?

In other words, (in Amy's words), does the presence of the piety "Heros are weak males," which I have identified as one of the conventions of dystopian fiction make the genre what it is? If we remove that piety, is it a different genre? How many does it take to have the desired rhetorical effect?

When we kill the weak hero of the dystopia, are we killing our own weaknesses?