“So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.”
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I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
Dramatic experience is not logical it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.
