The Greeks believed that the Muses were the offspring of Zeus (God) and Memneke (Memory). One way of understanding this insight is that poets produce their art due to a combination of inspiration and memory.
In other words, we have to have some kind of knowledge in order to create good poems. You cannot be an ignorant poet. Indeed, one could argue that there is no such thing as a great poet who is ignorant. Think about the great poets. Goethe was a scientist who studied the physics of light and biology, a bureaucrat who helped manage a princedom, a well-read writer, and a traveler. He studied languages and history, read philosophers and ancient writers. Shakespeare demonstrated his knowledge of the Trivium, of history, of philosophy, and of the literatures of other cultures in his works. Keats was a doctor, as was Chekov. The point is that these were educated people.
The poet must be an educated person. Not just educated in a narrow sense--having a B.A. in English, a M.A. in English, and a Ph.D. in English is being educated in a narrow sense--but in as broad and universal a sense as possible. There are English-major Marxists, English-major Freudians and Jungians, and English-major theorists; unfortunately, actual economists, psychologists, and philosophers barely recognize the English-major versions of their fields.
This is not to denigrate English as a degree. I do, after all, have a major in English, a Master's in English, and a Ph.D. in the Humanities that focused on creative writing and literary studies, and I learned a great deal from my literary theory classes--and I took as many literary theory classes as I could, because I enjoyed them so much. However, I did also major in biology and minor in chemistry, I do have two years of graduate classes in molecular biology, and I taught myself enough economics, psychology, and sociology to have peer-reviewed publications in those fields. I have studied mythology on my own and to get my Humanities degree. I truly believe in the synthesis of science and the humanities, that there shouldn't be "two cultures." I don't know if any of this makes me a great poet, but it certainly means I have a great many things in memory.
This knowledge of course has to include thousands of poems, as well as novels, short stories, and plays. There is no such thing--anywhere at any time--as a poet who is anything less than mediocre who isn't well-read. This "reading" includes oral traditions, including songwriters who are inspired/influenced by other songwriters. There's no such thing as a writer who wasn't a prolific reader. The two go hand-in-hand.
But knowledge and ideas are not enough. We also need inspiration.
The word "inspiration" literally means "breathe in." However, in many languages, the word for soul or spirit is "breath." To have inspiration is thus to have a spirit within you. You may call that spirit God, or you may call it, along with Socrates, a "daimon," but whatever it may be, it feels like it's coming from somewhere other than yourself. It's certainly coming from somewhere other than your conscious self. If you feel inspired, there is a kind of sudden insight that makes you want to write (or paint, or make music, etc.).
If you prefer a less mythical/mystical version of inspiration, there's also a psychological one. Our minds are often working on problems in the background, then feed the finished solution to our conscious minds all at once, in what we call "a flash of insight." This can happen with scientists--Einstein being a famous case, with his insight about relativity coming to him in a dream--and it can certainly happen with poets.
With poets, though, inspiration is more of a learning something that is of personal importance to us. That is, it's a kind of subjective knowledge. When we communicate what we have learned in verse, we express poetic truth. How well we communicate that truth depends upon our skills as poets.
When you communicate your subjective understanding, you add to the wealth of human knowledge. We need your insight, your understanding, your interpretation of things--and we need you to write so well someone will read it, so it actually becomes part of human knowledge by becoming a part of your reader and how your reader ever after thinks. And that means writing something people can and will remember.
At the same time, if you are only relying on inspiration, you may write a few dozen poems in your life, none of them any good. As we've already seen, there's more to writing poetry.
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