Your only true poets were the unlettered peasants, who poured forth their hearts in song, not because they wished to make poetry, but because they were joyous and true.
"Colleges, academies, schools of learning, schools of literature, and all such institutions, Jasmin denounced as the curse and the bane of true poetry.

They had spoiled, he said, the very French language.

You could no more write poetry in French now than you could in arithmetical figures.

The language had been licked and kneaded, and tricked out, and plumed, and dandified, and scented, and minced, and ruled square, and chipped--( I am trying to give an idea of the strange flood of epithets he used)--and pranked out, and polished, and muscadined--until, for all honest purposes of true high poetry, it was mere unavailable and contemptible jargon.
"It might do for cheating agents de change on the Bourse--for squabbling politicians in the Chambers--for mincing dandies in the salons--for the sarcasm of Scribe-ish comedies, or the coarse drolleries of Palais Royal farces, but for poetry the French language was extinct.

All modern poets who used it were faiseurs de phrase--thinking about words and not feelings.