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This one reminds me of Robert Service’s Cremation of Sam McGee in its rhyme and how it scans. Whatever you think of these poems, it’s interesting to imagine a time in the US when they could be popular among a wide readership. Poetry seems to have shrunk its audience faster than any other written genre.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-o...

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My pet theory is that the decline of poetry tracks the advancement of mass media and decline of other types of public/social performance. There were always genres and authors of poetry that were specifically for reading aloud with a group - Robert Service being a good example. It was fun and play. What market there was for this kind of poetry narrowed as mass media expanded, and poetry was relegated to children and the literary.

Alternate take: rap has eaten poetry and poets

I kind of agree about rap, and more agree about mass media. More broadly I'd say popular music has eaten poetry. The ballads all got instrumental tracks. Maybe poetry faded because broadcasting became easier. High-bandwidth information beat out low-bandwidth information, because it concentrated more stimuli in a single medium.

That is certainly true, yes.

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