This battle is centuries old. It has its roots in the mists of time when civilizations were being born.

It's a clash of opposing philosophies, now bursting forth with renewed energy. Volleys and counter-volleys are flying.

Don't worry, though, nobody been's killed, no massive deceptions of the American public have been mounted, and the Constitution has been spared -- in this fight, at least.

The combatants are civilized folk. They wage their battles on the pages of literary reviews and magazines seldom read by the general populace. Much like the trench warfare of World War I, the fight changes very little.

I'm talking about the "po-biz," the land of rhyme, meter and MFA programs where the battles are between the factions of Pound, Eliot and Stevens on one side and of Longfellow, Ogden Nash and Billy Collins on the other.

Intellectuals vs. the Philistines, the elite vs. the bourgeois, the purists vs. the popular culture crowd.

Money, of course, is the source of this latest clash, $88 million, according to a story in the Feb. 19-26 New Yorker.

That's the final figure from the bequest that pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly made in 2002 to Poetry magazine, a small but highly regarded review published in Chicago since 1912.

Suddenly people got greedy once the money was released. What a surprise.

The Windy City worthies on the review's foundation board hired a Wall Street wheeler-dealer and amateur poet named John Barr to lead them into this promised land of poesy where starving poets would be a thing of the past.

It's clear from the New Yorker story and from Barr's essay, "American Poetry in the New Century," appearing in Poetry last year, that the owners of this windfall cared less about struggling artists and more about setting up a "business model" for the promotion of poetry as a product.

When you're from Wall Street, spending money is easy. To advance the cause of poetry, Barr plunked $7 million down on property along that stretch of Michigan Avenue called the Magnificent Mile for a new headquarters.

In his essay, Barr claims American poetry has become stagnant and inbred, stuck in the swamp of academia. He called for "new" poetry that would entertain, attract wide audiences and be available day and night.

To show that Americans love poetry, he paid $700,000, The New Yorker claims, for a survey that found "90 percent" of the nation reads poetry.

Also doled out were $1 million for a Web site, www.poetryfoundation.org, and money to pay for Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column of his favorite poems. Kooser, former insurance company executive, was U.S. poet laureate in 2004-06.

As an example of this "new poet," Barr gave Collins, another poet laureate, $25,000 as a prize because his slight and unchallenging works make money.

That poet once tried to filch the rights to his work for a few bucks from the University of Pittsburgh Press, his first publisher, in order to pad out a collection from his new outfit, Random House. At least Collins appreciates that poetry was all about the bottom line.

Joining Barr and Collins in the poetry-for-profit contingent are public radio superstar and literary aficionado Garrison Keillor, and his friend, Dana Gioia, poet and politically savvy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Barr's Poetry Foundation is a sponsor of Gioia's Poetry Out Loud initiative that rewards high school students for their skill in reciting poems they've memorized in front of audiences.

Keillor edited an anthology of verse called "Good Poems," selected from his public radio show, "Writer's Almanac." Gioia wrote an effusive review of the book for Poetry after he was featured on another Keillor radio production, "Literary Friends."

This side of the po biz is one big happy family, backslapping and log-rolling along.

The other faction, however, is a disorganized bunch -- full-time poets, professors and teachers, members of various schools of the genre and some ordinary folk who even write poetry for its own sake.

Pittsburgh has a healthy, enthusiastic and serious contingent of those "citizen poets."

This faction does its share of log-rolling as well, but few make much money. Their publications are not best-sellers, the publishers themselves scrape along, bolstered by subsidized university presses like Pitt's that have supported many poets, Collins and Kooser included, in their early years.

Until The New Yorker took up its cause, this army had to fight back in its little literary publications, mere popguns against the flush Poetry magazine's cannons.

You can find the various salvos on that million-dollar Web site.

Is this a battle for poetry's soul in the 21st century, or simply another skirmish in the larger war of "high art" struggling to survive against the tidal wave of commercial entertainment?

In our democracy, the lowest common denominator gets all the money. In the case of Mr. Barr's crusade, it was the money that won out over the art.

The battle for poetry's not over, but the way Barr's spending the Lilly grant, his money will run out before long and the odds will get fairer.