While this has occasionally been suppressed by claims for the language of the common folk, whether by Crabbe or by McDowell, the claim itself borders on the bogus, as you are as likely to hear metaphor, analogy and other figures of speech from a cocktail waitress as from a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Most often, in the opinion of this writer, claims by poets to act on behalf of the common folk are patronizing and oppressive, rather like de-emphasizing the teaching of mathematics to female students because they just don't get it . Tell that to the ghosts of Rosalind Franklin or Ada Byron. Artful language and metaphor of a high order have been expected by poetry audiences because ordinary usage and casual metaphor are used by almost everyone else. Most often, the absence of metaphor as a way of appealing to or characterizing the innocence of the plebes is an arrogant fool's propaganda for the superiority of his own position in life.
Good poets avoid such intellectual plagues.
Storytelling in poetry, critically trashed during the Modernist era and since, began in the oral tradition of every culture on earth. There are more possible narratives in the world than there are people. And, in order for each of us to live, the narrative we follow has to make some sort of sense. It follows that poetic narrative should follow the same expectation if its author wants the piece to make sense to a reader or listener. What critics of this approach fail to acknowledge is that convention and artistic technique have almost nothing to do with contents except to deliver it in a way that conveys something to someone other than the artist.