I think that we do judge poetry, and writing in general, by the ideas that it expresses and the clarity with which they are developed. Good writing is persuasive: it makes an argument and convinces, or tries to convince, its reader. Good poetry is doubly persuasive, because it forces us to take it in its own terms. Because persuasion is the key characteristic of good writing, all writing, and specifically all poetry, should be open to discussion outside of the context in which it would be read. Some have called this type of analysis "reading against the grain", but it is simply critical thinking, thinking of the type even readers of newspapers or magazines engage in when they write angry letters to the editor. Once you send a piece of writing into the world, it participates immediately in the game of critical revision and reconfiguration; it evokes a response, it is filed away, it is compartmentalized and defined in the reader's mind. But writing is like any remark in a conversation or argument: it intends, it signifies some movement of the mind or the soul intended to throw the reader, like driftwood under a wave. Only, you, the writer, have the ability to retract it, rewrite it, and submit it again, if you discover it has not the desired effect. Perhaps the writing process is a continual wrestling with and wresting of meaning from the reader, or a kind of battle between reader, writer, and poem. The best poems revise their readers even as they are being revised, and that is why they are so powerful and enduring. A classic is that which is infinitely subverted and yet, in the process, subverts. In any event, the development and substantiation of ideas is just as much the provenance of good writing as a certain felicity of form.