The status of poetry has, for the time being, gone down. I believe that interest in the study of literature almost always goes back and forth between text and context. Then that intensity died down and interest in the text itself, especially mediated by psychoanalysis, became very strong. The two genres very useful for information retrieval in that respect are drama and fiction. The very function of fiction is to show many levels of society and to show people in different social contexts.
Poetry is the least informative genre to the casual reader about social circumstance.
Students look to poetry, and don't know what you can say about it, since it seems to have no characters, plot, or setting. When they come to college, it's usually their first serious acquaintance with poetry. Some of them take to it like ducks to water, but I wouldn't say they know much at the beginning about how to relate to it. I think we are a very young country. We haven't yet prized our own cultural heritage.