Making Poetry Popular

Ryan:  Keats was the son of a stableman.  Spenser was the son of a tailor and lied his way into university.  Whitman's dad was a carpenter and his mother was barely literate.  Kerouac was an immigrant football jock. And yet Byron, Tennyson, and Shelley were all nobles.  Yeats was a lawyer politician.  Kierkegaard was a priest.  

Background matters not a damn to poets.  Shakespeare's family were tenant farmers and Will himself only rose to prominence through acting, because he was desperate for money.  

You are right, we cannot afford to be elitist, but additionally we cannot afford to have poetry measured by the worst of it, and bad poetry does exist, no matter how egalitarian it would be to say that everything written as poetry deserves the name.  How does one "let poetry die" and yet continue to write?  Shall we just become generic producers of text?  Ignore the craft itself and spew any old crap onto a page and stick it in Dewey Decimal 811?