Power to the Poets?

Robert Archambeau, on the Samizdat blog, writes extensively on the variety of potential relationships between poetry and power. He begins by addressing Robert von Hallberg's identification of Robert Pinsky with power (presumably because of his post as laureate), and expounding on the history of (major) poets’ relationship with the powers-that-be, from Shakespeare to Tennyson to Pound. For example, with regards to Pound’s claim that poetry is a defence against “slushy thinking”:

In this dream of poetic influence on power, the "governor or legislator" probably has no idea that his language, and, by implication, his mental framework has been conditioned by the poet. But in controlling the meanings of words, poets have an enormous power as unacknowledged legislators. One might well argue that it isn't the literati who control the meaning of words, since their contribution to these matters is quantitatively minimal in relation to the products of mass culture. But arguments are for reasoners, and Pound isn't reasoning here so much as he's dreaming of a way for the things he loves to be important not just to him, but to the polity at large. There's will-to-power here, for sure, and a compensatory gesture — the sort of thing Seamus Heaney, in a very different context, would call "pap for the dispossessed." The dispossessed here being poets in modernity.

Archambeau is certainly participating in an interesting and perhaps necessary discussion, but at least one key point is left unclear: what is “power”? How do we speak of power when we leave it relatively undefined? Is power merely one’s proximity to the mechanisms of governmental order? Or is it tied to the reproduction and dissemination of ideology? Is one poet more powerful than another because of his or her occupation / publication history? Or is power something more diffuse?