What of poetry is generally passed down from generation to generation?

Poetry is 'memorable speech' said W. H. Auden. The handing down to posterity has always been considered as a high-art criterion. From Matthew Arnold's classification of Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power and even before, universality is held up as the hallmark of great literature, great poetry included.

The truths presented to by a great poem are always of a general and timeless nature, even if it is a context-bound and specific poem with contemporary issues. Poetry inductively touches the generic experience of mankind--universal phenomena like love, relationships, birth, death, thought-processes, psychic states. These fundamental aspects are surely handed down. Apart from the content what one remembers is its rhythm, style and language. The poets are the makers as well as evolvers of a language and poetry in many way creates the future of a language; its innovations are incorporated into the language with the passage of time.