Nine Tentative Definitions of Poetry

"Indeed if teachers, either through habit or fear, are so tied to the dictionary that the imaginative flight of students is inhibited, they world do well to follow Carl Sandburg through the following lines:

NINE TENTATIVE DEFINITIONS OF POETRY

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
2. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
3. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.
4. Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest of dead marches.
5. Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.
6. Poetry is a payback of invisible keepsakes.
7. Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
8. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
9. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words."

From a text I'm reading called "Reflective Thinking: The Method of Education", 1964, by Hullfish and Smith, quoting "The Sandburg Range", 1928, by Carl Sandburg.