The genesis of a poem

What is it? Where does it come from? Why do we write poems? I don't know how I write ,it just comes over me, like a mood or a hunger and I have to satisfy it.Ted Hughes-a great thinker- goes further, he puts it as 'a facility for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction-whether our own or that of others whose feeling we can share.' He sums it up perhaps in one more line. 'The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case the voice of pain..'

The resulting poem then is the physical treatment by which the poet attempts to reconcile that pain within the world.

My old Pal Dylan Thomas says similarly that a poem is a process that begins with an image based on the emotions which then breeds conflicting images within an intelectual framework until the contradictions are resolved in 'that momentary peace which is a poem. ' Cool.