Former Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz, died in May 2006.  Here is how he described the feeling of writing poems:

“The poem comes in the form of a blessing—‘like rapture breaking on the mind,’ as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.”

I liked these two interesting couplets:

"We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."

Becoming, never being, till
Becoming is a being still.

Some articles—
In The Economist
In the Washington Post