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Prose was Democratised, Poetry remained largely
Aristocratic

(20) For instead of being the rare accomplishment of a few choice spirits, as it is and has been for long in the West, poetry was the universal atmosphere of Polynesian life, and especially of Maori life. Nothing was done without it, at least nothing that was aristocratic and did not belong to slaves or common men or common employments. Though their music and dancing degenerated into amusements, they still retained the marks of their religious birth, and poetical literature retained them too, whilst prose literature, the legend, the fable, and the proverb, early threw them off. All the life of the conquerors from South Asia was interlaced with their poetry, most of it ancient, much of it modern. And, though many of their gods and demigods and heroes, and many of their religious beliefs came in with the women of the conquered into their households and the early education of their children, the poetry was almost monopolised by them, and doubtless, as a whole, points back to South Asia as its birthland. It is in the prose legend that we may seek for relics of the conquered; they were early emancipated from the tutelage of religion, doubtless by the help of the conquered mothers of the immigrant conquerors' children; these would take care to fill the imaginations of the young with the stories of their own past.