Baudelaire

Baudelaire defined poetry perfectly as "something a little vague which leaves room for conjecture."

That also, coincidentally, defines Bob Dylan's post-electric lyrics to the max.

Baudelaire also wrote:  "It is at once by and through poetry, by and through music that the soul catches a glimpse of the splendors which lie on the other side of the grave: and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, those tears are not the proof of excessive enjoyment; they are much more the sign of an irritated melancholy, a nervous postulation, a nature exiled in an imperfect world which would like to take possession at once on this very earth of a revealed paradise.  Thus the principle of poetry is strictly and simply human aspiration towards a higher beauty and this enthusiasm which is completely independent of passion, which is the intoxication of the heart, and of truth which is the field of reason.