Poetry, for all its merits, has no program or volume to rival the current popularity of Oprah and Harry Potter, but even so, the decline of its already modest following is noteworthy. Some critics and readers claim that most poetry today is too cloistered and inaccessible, or that it is just plain bad. Yet a telephone survey conducted in 2005 by the National Opinion Research Center on behalf of the Poetry Foundation found that only 2 percent of respondents said they didn’t read poetry because it was “too hard.”