>But I want to ask , and I am not being snotty, what are the
>standards that make Pound's or Stevens' poetry good ?
Call me an aesthete and a formalist, but freshly beautiful use of language, and emotional and/or intellectual complexity. What makes so much "political" art bad is that it recycles cliches - that it's painfully earnest and straightforward. Tell the truth, but tell it slant, as Emily Dickinson said.
Doug