Death of death of poetry

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/death-death-poetry

“Poetry, then, appears to be:

1. a vacuous synonym for excellence or unconsciousness. What else is common to the public perception of poetry?
2. It is universally agreed that no one reads it.
3. It is universally agreed that the nonreading of poetry is (a) contemporary and (b) progressive. From (a) it follows that sometime back (a wandering date, like “olden times” for a six-year-old) our ancestors read poems, and poets were rich and famous. From (b) it follows that every year fewer people read poems (or buy books or go to poetry readings) than the year before.
   Other pieces of common knowledge:
4. Only poets read poetry.
5. Poets themselves are to blame because “poetry has lost its audience.”
6. Everybody today knows that poetry is “useless and completely out of date”—as Flaubert put it in Bouvard and Pécuchet a century ago.

For expansion on and repetition of these well-known facts, look in volumes of Time magazine, in Edmund Wilson’s “Is Verse a Dying Technique?,” in current newspapers everywhere, in interviews with publishers, in book reviews by poets, and in the August 1988 issue of Commentary, where the essayist Joseph Epstein assembled every cliché about poetry, common for two centuries, under the title “Who Killed Poetry?””