It's as if they're threatened by an imaginary creature that doesn't exist. There's an ongoing argument among academics that the eloquence and passion of verse died out long ago, and modern poetry is nothing but a babble of oversentimental experimentation hyped up by half-witted hooligans who don't know a terza rima from a hole in the wall. From time to time, we even hear poets decry their own profession. As a poet who writes, teaches and performs poetry professionally, I am continually having to alter my perception of what poetry is. The very lure of it for me is that I don't fully understand it.
Good poems tend to present more questions than answers.
I guess it helps to have a big imagination to take in enough poetry so you can make up your own mind about what it is. I feel like every time I read a new poem, the dimensions of my imagination expand a little more in some direction. There are poems that string themselves out into novel lengths and become epic tales. If poetry is verse and the Bible is written in verse, perhaps we can think of the Bible as one long poem. Armed with an all-purpose poetic license, the poet can disobey rules of language, ignore punctuation and spelling, toss words all over a page, cluster lines into islands of words, and let loose a hurricane of emotion.