The poet is a translator

A poet is always a translator, whether or not there is something physically sitting in front of him to translate. He translates the essence of the universe into a readable format. Some of my favorite poems are the ones I look back at and think "I couldn't have written that, it's too obvious, too perfect." In those cases, I think these poems already existed in the universe, and I just took them out of the ether. In some cases though, maybe I'm just remembering a long-forgotten strain of somebody else's poem, perhaps a misreading, or an unconscious re-working, but the reason it achieves perfection in my mind is because of its familiarity, the echoing of a previous time. Many times, when I come across such a perfect poem or a perfect line that I think is unique, I will actually discard it because of the fear of plagiarism, that perhaps it is someone else's line that I internalized.