It's also possible that poets gave up on old forms after the popular audience for poetry had already begun to disappear. As poets felt themselves more isolated, they began to write more for one another (and for editors and critics) than for ordinary readers. A big exception is Frost, of course, who also used common diction in a formal setting and who kept a large audience. But he had to go through an evolution of his own. Read some of his very early lyrics and hear all the Victorian diction that marked and marred the poetry of the late nineteenth century.
I doubt that we can judge most contemporary art very well, and I doubt that anyone ever could. There's too much of it. If you read the Norton Anthology of Poetry, you come away thinking that there was some golden age of poetry when the Shakespeares and the Byrons and the Dickinsons were bumping into one another. But an anthololgy might devote a hundred pages to an entire century; the dross has been eliminated. If each edition of the dozen or so biggest poetry journals of the twentieth century had just one truly great poem, no anthology could hold them all.
Richard
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