Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

Men's lives are short .
The hard man and his cruelties will be
Cursed behind his back and mocked in death.
But one whose heart and ways are kind - of him
strangers will bear report to the whole wide world,
and distant men will praise him.

- Penelope in Robert Fitzgerald trans. THE ODYSSEY (364)

I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer's sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below.

Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.