how the poem lives as an entity

It seems to me that at its best - and this is what we search for in poems all the time - poetry approximates, through the powerful use of language, our fundamental, original  sense of life's miraculousness, its profound and mysterious meaning. When poems catch and burn as we want them to, they are taking us back to the first recognition and naming of a thing, to something like childhood wonder, a sense of our own lives and the surrounding world as possessing depth and being charged with meaning and potential discoveries, a sense of energied understanding. Poetry does this by communicating excitement through the character of the poem's language - not through the words' denotations or the poem's statement so much as through how the poem lives as an entity. The poet's excitement seems to communicate directly, subliminally to the reader. 

- John Steffler, from his essay "Language as Matter" in Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays & Interviews (Quarry Press, 1995).