things that are true expressed in words that are beautiful.
-Dante

the best words in the best order.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
-William Wordsworth

emotion put into measure.
-Thomas Hardy

a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.
-Robert Frost

a revelation in words by means of the words.
-Wallace Stevens

Poetry is prose bewitched.
-Mina Loy

the clear expression of mixed feelings.
-W.H. Auden

an angel with a gun in its hand…
-José Garcia Villa

the language in which man explores his own amazement.
-Christopher Fry

hundreds of things coming together at the right moment.
-Elizabeth Bishop

Poetry is sound art.
-Joy Harjo

Reduced to the simplest and most essential form, the poem is a song. Song is neither discourse nor explanation.
-Octavio Paz

Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written.
-Charles Simic

A poem should not mean
But be.
-Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”

So maybe now you know what we’re studying in my Literary Interpretation class. Exciting. And pretty scary.