I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Seamus HeaneyA writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.
Seamus Heaney