As things are now, it's over. That's not to say, however, that there couldn't be a revival, but it'd be an unenviable task. Although I think that poetry has a grander purpose, it's too much to ask of any artist to devote himself to a craft from which he could expect nothing. Why give a decade's labor to a poem that'd give, in turn, neither riches, nor laurels; neither the acclaim of the many, nor the admiration of the eminent few; and neither honors when living, nor monuments when dead?
We have no Ariostos for the same reason we have no Raphaels. Great poetry requires a great culture, in its own way, to foster it. It's no coincidence that the greatest Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, were all living in the age of Pericles, nor is it suprising that Rome's greatest poets, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, among others, were all living in the age of Augustus. Could a lone poet composing in a debased language ever hope to write something as great as these poets did?
