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There is an interesting article (Poetry and Politics) over at the Kenyon Review blog -- on what political poetry is and how it should function.

Here are a couple of good quotes:

I believe that any literary achievement is relational. In other words, a poem achieves its greatness in relation to multiple values, traditions, protocols, formal characteristics, styles, shifts, variations, modes, sounds, and beliefs. Truly great poetry, that which demands rereading generation after generation, may be that which most successfully carries out its work with regard to and in terms of many such concerns, and in doing so uncannily appeals to future generations’ concerns, needs, beliefs, and desires.

And:

If the poem is to be a living act, then it must relate itself to a variety of human concerns, experiences, understandings, and judgments. Among these concerns will likely be such issues as the establishment and control of spheres and conduits of force and influence, the struggle for identity, who gets to speak, and even what is speakable. In addressing these issues, poetry is likely to be implicitly political. There is no reason why it should not at times be political in an overt sense as well.

Among many in the poetry world, including myself at times, political poetry has been seen as somehow "less than" other modes of poetic expression. In this article, Jerry Harp argues that all great poetry will be necessarily political if it deals with human concerns.

As long as we are able to read the poem for what it is, and not attempt to deconstruct it in some way to demonstrate meanings not contained in the poem itself, I am all for this point of view.

As an example, Harp cites William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" as a political poem in the sense he is advocating:

In the course of its natural descriptions, the poem also considers memory, seclusion, the “din / Of town and cities,” “unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love,” the soul, “the life of things,” prospects of future things, “coarser pleasures of boyish days,” the alienation from nature of human consciousness, the motion and spirit “that impels / All thinking things”–the poem contemplates all of this and more in a language of stately iambic pentameter that swerves uncannily toward human speech rather than the expectations of poetic diction (and every generation must swerve away from what has become its immediate precursors’ expectations.)

I think that Harp is arguing for a broader definition of the political, one that incorporates all of human experience -- perhaps one that can be found in Webster's under "politics," definition 5a: "the total complex of relations between people living in a society."

In this sense, all great poetry is political.