Great Regulars: After all, unless Freud and Jung

and Joseph Campbell are all wrong, a poem tends to have one foot in the unconscious and the other in the sunshine. Everyone who has ever written a successful poem knows what I am talking about: In the time necessary to get from the start of a poem to its conclusion, the poet is operating like a pilot in the early days of aviation, relying less on external controls, even in the case of highly formal poetry, and more on his own experience and intuition to gauge the plane’s position and performance as he tries to find his way and then bring the craft in for a nice soft landing.

from David Kirby: The American Interest: Why, Poetry?

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