Krugman--yeah that Krugman--asks, "when and why did we stop reading poetry? Educated people used to read it all the time, or at least pretend to; that’s no longer the case. Frankly, I don’t read poetry except on very rare occasions. What happened?"
Can't say that I know, Paul. However my guess is that our pedagogic post-Sputnik obsession with math and science sorrowfully amounted to something of a zero-sum gain.
I never read poetry myself until the gorgeously written palinodes of W.H. Auden got me going, only a handful of years back. These spurred me on to--yep, here I go again--the peerless H. Bloom, whose Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer to Robert Frost, all 959 pages of it, now dwells not by my bed, but on it, in the place of my eternal love.