BsI recently watched an HBO documentary on Bruce Springsteen and his album High Hopes. He had an interesting thing to say about what artists (including poets) do:

He said, "Fundamentally, we're repairmen. Everybody's broken somewhere. You can't get through life without it. You've paid your artists and your filmmakers and your poets and your novelists to be basically your handymen. They're your repairman and we're willing to go into the garage where all this junk is lying around and we start to tinker away and when you contextualize and make small sense of those things, they just start to repair those small pieces of you."