Prior to the 19th century few artists simply followed their muse and made a living off it by selling the product to the masses. There simply weren't any masses with the education, or, more importantly, the readily available cash to support them, and no established market for art and literature. So artists were in effect servants, making works for hire for princes and bishops and patrons, and by and large making them to order. Poets, working in what we now view as the most personal genre of all, were no exception.

It was only with the spread of general education and the development of a middle class with time and disposable income on their hands, that art was transformed into a tradeable commodity. Unfortunately for poets this coincided with the rise of the novel as the 800 pound gorilla of literature, and the gradual retreat of poetry into the ivory tower of academia and the ghetto of niche publishing. Suddenly there was a market for literature. But it was a market with just about no demand for what the poets were selling.

So the poets were, if anything, actually worse off. The time of the wealthy patron was drawing to a close. But no new source of livelihood had replaced them.

To this day, poets have been dependent on writing part time, or on variants of the old system of patronage, through public funding (in the case of some European countries) and the academic tenure path (in the United States). The nature of the latter of these in particular favoured a style of poetry which contributed to making the gulf between contemporary poetry and the general reading public even wider, until even abstract academic disciplines, such as quantum mechanics, had a wider audience than the poets did.

While widening the scope of what poetry could be, and producing work of immense power, the pioneers of lyrical modernism also set poetry on a course towards its own end as a form of communication. It is instructive to look to one of the towering figures in the genesis of literary modernism, the French boy genius Arthur Rimbaud, who all but ran the course of modernism all by himself, and found that, having done so, standing still or turning back was impossible. The rest was silence.

Which is why the new found wealth of the Poetry Foundation is a sign of the decline of the field, not a harbinger of renewed life. People have made the claim that Rock & Roll is dead almost since the day the first electric guitar was plugged in to an amplifier. And today it might even be true. But if Rock is drawing its terminal breath, poetry, as an important cultural expression, is approaching archaeological status. Classical music is positively frisky in comparison.

Back in 2002 Ruth E. Lilly, sole heiress to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, whose own poems had been routinely rejected by the magazine, made an endowment of no less than $200 million to Poetry Magazine, which at the time had only four employees. The endowment allowed the small outfit to expand into a full blown organisation, the Poetry Foundation, fund a number of awards, and set up a web site with an annual budget of a mind-boggling $1 million (as a small comparison, Bits of News, with a bigger audience, had an annual budget last year just north of $1600).

Founded in 1912 by Chicago Tribune art critic Harriet Monroe, the monthly publication is the oldest and perhaps pre-eminent poetry journal in the English language, and has published, and rejected, poems from virtually every totem pole of 20th century English verse, such as Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

And when editor Emily Warn, in Dana Goodyear's in depth article "The Moneyed Muse" in the recent edition of The New Yorker, states that their web ambitions are to,

become the Billboard or the Entertainment Weekly of the poetry world, reflecting everything that’s happening without a dogmatic point of view.

It is a laudable goal, aside from the fact that the poetry world is a small one indeed these days, like one of those German fairy tale princedoms before Bismarck steamrollered them.

The foundation is negotiating to buy the double lot, which is on the market for seven million dollars, and, if the deal goes through, will house a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot building that should be ready in several years. There will be room for a library, offices for the magazine and the foundation, and a lecture hall. (The foundation already has an excellent series; this fall, there were readings by Mark Strand, Robert Hass, and Gary Snyder, as well as a staged reading of Richard Wilbur’s verse translation of “Tartuffe.”) “The building won’t be palatial, but it will have an identity as a national home for poetry,” Barr [president of the Poetry Foundation, John Barr] said. It will also have space for the foundation’s new project: the Poetry Institute, a think tank modelled on the Aspen Institute, for researching issues in contemporary poetry and organizing symposia to disseminate the findings. Its first effort was a survey completed last spring by the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago, which cost seven hundred thousand dollars, and revealed, along with a great deal of other data, that ninety per cent of American readers value poetry.

The Poetry Foundation functions as an operating foundation, spending most of its money on its own activities rather than on grants. As Ethel Kaplan, a lawyer at a wealth-management firm and the chair of the board, put it, “Nobody wanted to sit back and read grant proposals—especially from poets.” By January, the foundation had received eighty-eight million dollars. After all the money has been distributed, the foundation’s budget will be about ten million dollars a year.

Now, an injection of capital of this size into a small field, is nothing to scoff at. But the problems of modern poetry are systemic. And even were it simply a matter of money, which it no longer is, it would not avail. Just as private charity and "family values" is no substitute for social security in a modern world, in spite of what some on the right of the political spectrum might want to believe, even a legacy as large as this can not buy poetry a new lease on life.

It is a hard thing to say for someone who started their writing career, such as it is, writing volumes of modern poetry, and has loved poetry, new and old - but the sad fact is that poetry, as anything other than a private concern, or a parlour game between a closed circle of devotees, is a thing long gone. And not even $200 million worth of CPR will return its pulse. Only cultural and societal changes equal to the ones that marginalised it in the first place can do that.

Some "problems" simply have no solution.