There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
Without realizing it the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.