The spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquility. –William Wordsworth
The art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors. –Thomas Macaulay
What ideas feel like. –Karl Shapiro
The art that offers depth in a moment. –Molly Peacock
Memorable speech. –W.H. Auden
Perfection of form united with a significance of feeling. –T.S. Eliot
Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. --Harold Bloom in The Best Poems of the English Language
This, I believe is the ultimate direction and goal of poetry, metaphor, and symbol—to express what is inexpressible, to fuse together what still remains separate. --Robert Siegel, The Christian Imagination, 351