Don't disagree on most of it being crap. Guess I've been on a bit of a Longley kick lately. My thoughts are that the value of truly talented poetry (holy subjectivity...) is the ability to convey or facilitate a greater sense of emotional clarity or purity.

The following quotes are attributed to Longley. Granted, there are very few people with his level of talent.

And one of the marvelous things about poetry is that it’s useless. It’s useless. “What use is poetry?” people occasionally ask in the butcher shop, say. They come up to me, and they say, “What use is poetry?” And the answer is no use, but it doesn’t mean to say that it’s without value. It’s without use, but it has value.

Well, it’s much more complicated than solace. I like the Aristotelian notion of catharsis. And I think what art can do is to tune you up. I mean, if you think of an out-of-tune violin, and tuning it up so that it’s in tune, I think that’s what art is, and that’s what art does. And good art, good poems is making people more human, making them more intelligent, making them more sensitive and emotionally pure than they might otherwise be.