The state of poetry has fallen alarmingly in the last two centuries Edwin Muir, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, declared in his opening lecture last night in New Lecture Hall.

The poetic estate is the result of poetry's effect on its audience, and this audience has shrunk to a small circle of people usually associated with universities Muir explained. The public at large, he claimed, merely goes its way, generally without realizing what it has lost.

Despite the public's present divorcement from poetry, Muir said, the appreciation and even the creation of verse were once very much public property. Two hundred years ago people lived in a handicraft culture, and Muir felt that artisans who could produce a fine chair would be more likely to appreciate a well constructed poem than would the owner of a large furniture store.

Ballads, Muir said, were the traditional folk poetry and it was through this form that the poet and his community could most closely join to create new works or alter existing ones. But even the ballad has fallen victim to contemporary tastes which have been dulled by movies, the radio, and the press.

The introduction of printing itself, he said, hastened the fall of the oral tradition by making large quantities of vulgar and sensational literature available to the public.