toujours travailler

As for your first quotation from Auden—his assertion that no one can create a work of art “by a simple act of will . . . but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him”—I agree. Still, I try never to forget that Rilke learned the opposite, or at least a complementary, lesson when he worked for Rodin in Paris. In Rodin’s words, “Il faut travailler, toujours travailler,” or in English, “One must work, always work.” So, practice is crucial, too. It certainly had a profoundly beneficial effect on Rilke’s poetry, which improved rapidly from that point on, as he started to write the two volumes of New Poems, where most of his thing-poems are to be found. Whereas before—when apparently he was always waiting for inspiration—his poetry was relatively vague and sentimental. Later, when he received the inspiration for the Duino Elegies, walking along the wall at Duino Castle—I believe the story is that he had some distressing financial business to take care of, and then suddenly he heard the opening lines of the first elegy—he was ready for it; he had the technique he needed to turn the inspiration into a masterpiece, because he’d been practicing for years.

- James Pollock, answering Alex Boyd's "One Question Interview" over on his blog. You can read the whole thing here. 

a much better poet whispering suggestions in your ear

I often write in metrical verse, sometimes in rhyme, sometimes in complex forms. I find that the discipline of this—in ancient India they called poetic metre a “yoga”—gives me access to sources of creative power that are deeper or higher than myself. As D.H. Lawrence puts it, “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me.” You mean to say one thing, but the prosody won’t quite let you, so you have to find a better way of putting it, and you find yourself saying all these surprising things; it’s like there’s a much better poet whispering suggestions in your ear. Your conscious will is busy working out the complex puzzle of the metre and so on, and this gives your unconscious—the gods, duende, whatever you want to call it—all kinds of opportunities to speak.

- James Pollock, in interview with The Toronto Quarterly. You can read the whole thing here.