I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Woe to that man who runs when God has not sent him; and woe to him who refuses to run, or who ceases to run, when God has sent him.