Each age can mock its predecessors and there is no more straw-like a target than a previous era's diction. How smug is it to mock what is no longer around to speak for itself?
Language is a deep, rich resource, and 'literary/poetic' language especially so - and it is possible to see all of its layers and practices as a well on which to draw - selectively, imaginatively and without constriction by
a priori dogma. That may be done clumsily or with flair but what seems, to me, most suspect of all is to take any one criterion - be it age, its novel opposite, location or currently dominant construction and usage - as a simplistic benchmark for mockery. It may, of course, so be - "but it ain't necessarily so." Thus my rather awkward response to this thread might run as follows....
In Dylan Thomas’ drunken days,
Neologisms ardent
Revealed the poet’s inmost ways -
Such coinage no harm meant.
Now words, unless they’re done to death
Or dulled by daily arg’ment,
Are thought by poets not worth breath,
So sense is banned enlargement.
And if their use is arse about,
Inverted in their placement,
Most critics will affrighted shout
Their logic shorn amazement.
Then if elision sidle in
To claim a deft emplacement,
The scribbling tribe with sneering grin
Will mock such strange displacement.
And as for verse with end line rhymes,
With clear conclusions lambent,
The hooting throng will claim, that times
Like these, require enjambment.
Yet should an ancient clamber free
From tomes of past encasement,
The day’s conventions soon will see
It thrust back in the basement.
So cast away archaic airs
From downloads play not parchment.
Let this time’s poets swear to heirs
That they in turn no harm meant!