News at Eleven: Briefly explained, it is a process

in which a poet, so impressed with an experience or image, is compelled to construct a verbal device, a poem, that will reproduce his emotional concept, recurrently, in anyone who cares to read it anywhere, anytime.

[Philip] Larkin's composition time for "The Explosion" was relatively brief. He already had a sense of the mining culture, for he had read D.H. Lawrence's writings of life in a mining village.

from The Wall Street Journal: The Poet's Alchemy

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