It’s not the poem that comes from the subconscious so much as the image. Also the single line, la ligne donnée. If I’m truly inspired, the line comes in meter and sets the form. But what comes from the subconscious is only the beginning. Then you work with it.
In the case of metaphor, it has everything to teach you about what you have felt, experienced. I write in order to find out what has happened to me in the area of feeling, and the metaphor helps. A poem, when it is finished, is always a little ahead of where I am. “My poem shows me where I have to go.” That’s from Roethke. His line actually reads: “I learn by going where I have to go.”
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Form is not fashionable these days. What’s being thrown out, of course, is music, which reaches the reader through his senses. In meter, the whole force is in the beat and reaches the reader, or the listener, below the rational level. If you don’t use meter, you are throwing away one of the biggest weapons to get at the reader’s subconscious and move him. …through form you reach the reader on this subliminal level. I love form. It makes you cut down…. When you read a poem in form, it’s pared down, it’s musical, and it haunts. …a lyric poem is easy to remember.
~ May Sarton interviewed in The Paris Review
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