The days of poets who make a living writing poetry are generally gone, I think.  Oh, we have a few, as mentioned above, but society doesn't value poetry in a way that will support many poets.  Instead, the poets of today are songwriters and lyricists.  Music is the one place we can still hear and respond to poetry; and to that extent, more people than ever are actually students of poetry.  A song is, in essence, a poem set to music.  We sometimes get it wrong and praise the musicality or the musician, but what we're really responding to is the poetry.

Bob Dylan, whom Johnny Carson felt was the greatest poet of his era, 

Do not create anything.  It will always be misinterpreted, and it will follow you.

These lines are very telling of our times.  People do not wish to hold up the poet; they simply wish to be satiated, and satiated for the unthinking moment. Someone else can do the thinking.

Poets, today, are viewed differently but not so much from the respect of what they are but from the perspective of what venue they use to express themselves. Certainly, there are still poets publishing today (such as Maya Angelou) who are "well-known" to an extent, but poetry has shifted to a different venue - the radio. If you think of songs as poems set to music, then I would argue that poets are seen as priests, teachers, and masters. Look at the following that music artists today engender, and look at the structure of the lyrics and the messages that those lyrics express. If that is not modern poetry, then I am not sure what is! When I teach American Lit to my college classes, I always close with the poetry of Tupac Shakur. The man was a genius - an amazing lyric poet who gained an almost religious following, who spoke of all that was wrong with his world, and who spoke in a way that young people understood. Today, poets are striving to merge literature with music (such as Nikki Giovanni's project "Hip Hop Speaks to Children" which sets poetry to rap beats). Poets still serve many of the same functions and fill many of the same voids today, they just do it a bit differently!

Poets in the past, in some countries and in some times, not everywhere at all times by any means, held places in societies like you mention.  Today, music in many forms plays that role.  Poets of the romantic period have been compared to the rock stars of today, for instance.   

In the past, written words were much more accessible than listened-to music, for obvious reasons; especially once the printing press was developed.  Today, music is available any time, any place. 

Unfortunately, most music listened to on the radio, at least, contains low-quality lyrics.  The music may be high quality, I don't know, that's not my field.  But the lyrics are filled with trite ideas, trite language, and cliches.  The quality of lyrics is very low.  Of course, the quality of ideas presented is also low, as is the amount of thinking and reasoning required to understand and appreciate the music.  The story is told that the song, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" (I have no idea if that's the exact title), was written in twenty minutes.  The story was told with great pride in the speaker's voice.  There's certainly no reason why the lyrics should have taken more than twenty minutes.  No one should be surprised about that.

Imagine a world in which people everywhere listened almost constantly to the world's greatest poetry?  I believe most social, economic, and political problems of the world would disappear quite quickly.