"Poetry is seeking to make not meaning, but beauty; or if you insist on misusing words, its "meaning" is of another kind, and lies in the relation to one another of lines and patterns of sound, perhaps harmonious, perhaps contrasting and clashing, which the hearer feels rather than understands, lines of sound drawn in the air which stir deep emotions which have not even a name in prose. This needs no explaining to an audience which gets its poetry by ear. It has neither time nor inclination to seek a prose meaning in poetry."
Basil Bunting, 'The Poet's Point of View' (1966), reprinted in Strong Words: Modern Poetry on Modern Poetry, W. N. Herbert & Matthew Hollis, eds (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2000): 81
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