When I was young, I wondered what the essential ingredient in a successful lyric poem actually was. I had learned that a poem did not have to have meter and rhyme, that a poem could do without the first person, and that no topic was impossible to poetry. But when I was disappointed in a poem I could not say why it was lifeless. What, I wanted to know, gave satisfying poems their life-likeness and intensity? At twelve I discovered that poems were not necessarily born as they appeared on the page, but often went through many drafts with seemingly unpredictable changes. I perceived, in astonishment, that poems grow and mutate like living things. But I could not determine the reasons behind the poet’s revisions, and I spent a good part of my fifteenth year puzzling over drafts of poems by Dylan Thomas, sent to me in microfiche from the University of Buffalo, which held the originals in enthralling number and variety. Already, Hopkins and Thomas had convinced me of the indispensable value of sound, so what I was trying to deduce from the drafts was the reason for revisions in sound as well as in every other layer of a poem, from plot to commas. I found that by imagining myself into the sensibility of the poet holding the pen (and often copying out each successive draft myself), I could ask “myself” why “I” preferred this word to that, this length of line to that, this tone to that. I was unhappy when I could not “figure out” the motive behind a given change, but by the time I had investigated all the Buffalo holdings (there were, as I recall, about thirty drafts of “Fern Hill” alone), I could guess some plausible motives for alterations: “I” was hunting down a more striking metaphor or a more energetic rhythm or a better stanza-form or a firmer point of view. But I still did not see what was directing the whole suite of changes occurring in the multiple evolutionary episodes of the poet’s accumulating pages. I had already memorized (so as to carry them around with me) many standard anthology pieces, but even making them “mine” did not illuminate the sustaining underlying “law” which I was convinced must be governing all the poet’s successive micro-revisions. I resorted to conventional ideas of how other verbal things (dialogues, fictions, arguments) were assembled: logic, listing, working toward and away from a climax, having symmetrical parts, but none of these seemed to offer the law for poems in general. Eventually, after some years, I realized that the deepest determining factor was what Coleridge had referred to as his “shaping spirit of imagination.” (I had glided carelessly over the adjective “shaping,” registering only “spirit of imagination.”) A mysterious human function, “shaping,” lay hidden within every successful poem: it ruled not only the construction of the whole poem but also of its substructures, down to its multiple individual layers — stanzas, sentences, rhythms, tenses, sounds, articles, point of view, punctuation. My own mind lacked this indispensable ability to make magnetic matches across layers, and the lack explained why I was not a poet, in spite of the verses that I had composed between six and twenty-six (when, doing my thesis, I discovered that what I could write was prose). What was that shaping function, I enviously wondered, and how did it operate? I had found no answer by introspection or by private composition: much as I was moved and delighted by the result of successful “shaping” (a poem that leapt off the page) and much as I was fascinated by its processes, I still could not understand the sureness of aim of a poem’s intrinsic growth toward secure life (even life as a fragment). Hopkins, in his last poem, “To R.B.,” compared the growth of a poem within the poet to a long pregnancy: the “sire” of the poem, its founding insight, has receded and seems lost but the mothering mind continues her patient work: The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim Now known and hand at work now never wrong. The composing poet knows when an arriving word matches the original insight and finds its aim: the hand at work is “now never wrong.” “Never wrong” was what I had sensed in an achieved poem — that an invisible contour of mind and feeling had pre-existed the drafts, and to take on life the poem had to match that initiating (and ever-governing) contour. Every revision was another try at a match, an attempt to obey the glimpsed “law” which had to be fulfilled. I say all this because when a strange new poet appears, it is not so much the “message” of the poetry that I hope to describe as the manner in which the message reaches us. How does the new voice create itself and what elements are implicitly being chosen or rejected as it speaks and we listen? Reviews of new poetry tend to dwell on the biography of the poet or the topical “message” of emotional concern (nowadays often political or ecological) put forward by the poetry. I always want, instead, an answer to my first question: is this poem one of those that will have the strength to survive? Milton hoped that he “might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.” Poems that can interest readers over centuries do not depend on topic or plot: they are more subtle, and more original, than that. In poems that outlast their own generation, the poet has found a voice and a way of thinking that does not sound or feel like anyone else’s. Around the living poems lie the heaps of unoriginal verses of patriotism or love or death that have succumbed to the passage of time. (A few of those, erected into national anthems or religious rituals, remain fixed in cultural memory, whatever their lack of imaginative distinction.) 
And so,
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence