Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.

Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.

One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.