The Struggle For Poetry's Soul

Walter Donway has an excellent article up on The Atlasphere: The Struggle For Poetry's Soul. He asks:

What, then, is the post-modernist contribution to the art of poetry? Virtually all so-called serious poetry, today, is written in free verse. In other words, it dispenses with meter — dispenses with it as a matter of principle — and so attacks the very essence of what makes poetry poetry.

I have a few quibbles with that, but I think his thrust his dead on. And, as he indicates, much the same holds true across the "serious" modern art forms.

Practitioners often start
By "pushing the limits" of art.
But the limits are long since crossed,
And the path to progress is lost.