This is a good one.

The venison is getting high, let's cut it down and shuck its ears and boil it and smear it in butter.

Poetry's demesne has shrunk, I suppose, but "poetry" is one of those words that's inestimably general. It used to mean "verse," because that's the only way that people could compose in language (its rhythm and rhyme, besides their intoxicating effects, were, of course, memory aids). Then it meant "verse" because stylish, mod young authors were getting into the hip prose (from its fenceposts unhooked! brutal!) so the traditional folk had to differentiate themselves. Then—presaging theatre's loss to film and film's loss to television, and television's loss to this other thing we have now—since this "prose" was so much easier to consume, most everyone lost interest in poetry, and writers of verse became artists (read: "shockers")—at which point they just had to go avant. So "poetry" meant language that has lost its shape, language taken beyond the literal (surliteral?) at every point; but also it came to mean (in the hands of sloppy sentimental knaves) just "beauty," or ironically, just "rhythm." It can refer to anything you can't make head nor tail of, and it can refer to anything that makes perfect sense on a first glance. It can refer to anything written, or it can refer to something done elegantly and concisely. If the royal family is smaller, its descent is much wider, since the prince has sewn his royal oats in so many other fertile media.

But the act you commit, Ray, in re-dignifying the "fallen" poetry, is to remind us of the historical change from medieval song to 20th-century poetry, and to look back at the older stuff as a different medium altogether. To say that song got split into poetry and music is to describe a fusion of two things which song's original authors would not have conceived of as separate. And so the original song becomes a living thing to consume (deer?), because it has been re-animated out of certain constituent parts. And next year, our culture will bifurcate again, and English songs will be visible as composed of two other things. The endless conversation; a good one, no?