The core of Stephen Burt's argument is that elliptical poetry is unabashedly, joyfully seditious. Most of this I like. On balance, Stephen Burt's essay is favorably disposed to the eccentric orbits of his elliptical system. These are all very laudatory qualities. Perhaps it wasn't such a bad thing to be.
Planets move in elliptical orbits.
If the universe condones it, it can't be all bad. This might be true in some cases, but certainly not all. The charge of deliberate obfuscation is more often meant to defuse work people find threatening because of its unconventionality, and to compensate for an unwillingness to see things differently. But it is also an unfortunate feature of human nature that people gravitate toward the familiar and avoid the unfamiliar. Mediocrity is rewarded with far greater frequency than originality.