A small but significant trend has emerged in the generally sporadic attention to poetry’s structural turning: a trio of thinkers have each, on their own, asserted that turns are inherently good, automatically communicating ethical truth by delivering diverse thought and, with it, radical empathy. Concerned that such a belief is misguided and misleading, “What Will It Profit?: Appraising Poetry’s Apocalyptic Turn” challenges this thinking by examining a particular kind of turn: the “apocalyptic turn,” a maneuver that concedes substantially the troubles of the world in order to then shift to praising existence. The poems that deploy this kind of structure work—to the extent they do at all—by carefully managing their representations of the world’s problems, which are often reduced to the approximate size of an individual or a family. Though they may seem as though they are, generally speaking, broadly representative, such poems in fact exclude all mention of systematic, structural inequality and so, though they aim to be hopeful, end up deeply ideological. The chapter concludes by clarifying that the turn, while not inherently good, certainly can be put to very good, even ethical, uses, and that if not always good, turns certainly are crucial sites that demand appraisal.