While this comment refers to a specific poetry collection, I like it as a worthwhile goal for poetry, or come to think of it, for writing more generally.

Its whole intent is to devastate those arrangements which are offered as truth by power’s window-dressers everywhere. 

There seems to be an epidemic of such arrangements on offer, much in need of some verbal-vastation.  In the past, the window-dressers of power at least had some wit-libbing, joke-throwing jesters to contend with – see my exuberant and award-winning book and its eponymous website on this enthralling topic. 

Source: Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected prose 1971-2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 159

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