"What sorts of discoveries in style does the youthful poet need to make? A governing stylistic decorum needs to be acquired (down to the smallest details of technique); this consciousness of the lyric medium is accompanied psychologically by a growing awareness of the problems attending acccurate expression of inner moods and attitudes. The poet needs also to identify the salient elements of the outer sense-world that speak to his idiosyncratic imagination; to devise his own particular axes of time and space; to decide on the living and non-living beings who will populate his work; and finally to find a convincing cosmological or metaphysical frame of being within which the activity of the poem can occur."
Helen Vendler from Coming of Age as a Poet
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