The names read like a high school literature primer’s table of contents: Frost. Byron. Whitman. Dickinson. Cummings. Wordsworth. Tennyson. Yeats. Their words canonized; their legacy secured; these poets stand as some of the greatest figures in literary history.

What’s more, all of them gained recognition and success during their lifetime. Their poems were read, memorized and adored by the general public, for whom reading poetry was not a painful academic exercise, but a form of entertainment.

In contrast, contemporary professional poets do not tower so high in the public imagination. Few, if any, achieve the ubiquitous acclaim of past poets. And while some may interpret this decline in prominence as a sign that poetry is dying, or perhaps already dead, others are not so sure.

“So what’s replacing poetry? Well, song lyrics, I think,” Tom Lisk, an English professor, said. “But that’s not replacing it, I suppose. It’s just a shift in how it’s delivered, and in a way, it’s a shift back.”

Indeed, poetry has its roots in music, according to Lisk, and not the other way around.

“Poems are called ‘lyric poems,’ and that really does mean the same thing as song lyrics,” he said. “A lot of Renaissance poetry that I’ve taught is meant to be sung, so I don’t see that there’s a big discrepancy between the two.”

Colleen Gillis, a junior in sociology, said poetry shouldn’t be confined to pages of rhyme and meter. Her definition of poetry is much broader.

“I think music is poetry in itself,” she said. “I don’t necessarily think you have to sit down with a book and go down to your local, like, cafe or something like that to necessarily [for it to] be poetry. Dance can be poetry. Music can be poetry. I think it can be whatever you want it to be,” she said.

According to Gillis, form is not so important as function when defining poetry. Instead, self-expression is key.

“It’s about just being true to yourself and being truthful with yourself about telling how you feel, or what you think,” she said.

Trey Williams, a freshman in biological sciences, said he agreed.

“I think music, probably, for kids today, is probably a big place of self-expression,” he said.

One of the ways students express themselves is through politics, according to Williams, and here, too, music plays a role.

“Some bands, like System of a Down or Rage Against the Machine, bring up issues, social issues and stuff you might not think about, and kind of put it on the agenda — put it on the table so you consider … the relationship between the government and the people,” Williams said.

Modern popular music often addresses political, social and ethical issues.

“Right after Bob Dylan hit the world, a lot of other people started singing lyrics that were not ‘hey-bop-a-loo-bop,'” Lisk said. “And it worked in me, the lyrics of The Doors and Bob Dylan, in particular.”

The association between poetry and popular music that artists like Dylan and The Doors helped make possible continues to grow, Lisk said, freeing poetry from the grip of academic analysis and teaching those who had always been intimidated by poetry how to enjoy, rather than dissect, language.

“When I first started teaching poetry … students were put off by it,” he said. “They thought it was a code that they had to decipher.”

That attitude still finds voice among students who see traditional poetry as removed from modern life.

“We’re living in a faster-paced society, so poetry kinda slows down everything,” Darius Godwin, a freshman in business management, said. “Everything now is like a right-now society. Music expresses a right-now feeling. It’s immediate. The words that are expressed in music you can relate to … but then with poetry, sometimes you have to dig deeper, and a lot of people aren’t willing to do that anymore.”

Gillis said she agrees a busier and more demanding lifestyle has helped cause the shift, but also, music is more portable.

“Music is accessible,” she said. “You can walk around with your iPod, and you can have a song you play over and over again, and that can be your form of poetry.”

This busy lifestyle, along with the glut of messages the recent explosion in media technology has spawned, has caused many people to turn off of poetry, Lisk said.

“I think consumer goods are filling everybody’s lives, so a poetry book or CD or downloaded mp3, for which you have to have a computer, you know, is commodification, in a way. … But the availability of stuff makes it, paradoxically, less desirable,” he said.

Still, Lisk said poetry remains vital, because it confers upon its readers delights and rewards no other art form can match.

“Poetry can reach you at a sensory level, an emotional level, an intellectual level, and at a playful, or entertaining level. What else does that?”