She liked to say that poems are meeting-places, and certainly as one composes a poem there is a sense of seeing farther than usual into the connections of things, and then of bringing intense pressure to bear on those connections, until they rise into full consciousness for oneself and others. The farther out along the frontiers of awareness the original elements of the poem lie, or the more deeply they are hidden, the more strenuous the poet's task and the more essential the poem. Its order and music must be such as to create a new whole.
in the foreword