(1) Self and language
We'll be looking at self, poem, world, as a kind of process. The self has an idea (from 'somewhere?) and makes it into a poem, and this poem is then spoken to, and speaks of, the 'world' in which that self lives. Why do this? What sort of communication is it?
When we say 'self' it sounds 'self-'conscious, and most people feel that in writing poems this writing self is in some way plumbed and probed. Or perhaps it's some sort of 'common' selfhood that's probed, and that's the source of the mixture of self-centredness and communication in poetry. You could seed this common selfhood, common humanity, collective unconscious, in terms of language itself. Language is very odd in that it captures both the intimately personal and at the same time is common to every speaker, or every human being insofar as we all have language.
A language is personal and is perhaps the only we in which we can examine ourselves and other people, but it's 'deeply' personal in the sense that we imbibe it from others, and in the context at least of love, and it carries all those earlier generations, including assumptions and connotations about 'the world', or the world as processed by, invented by, a particular culture. It's this sort of thinking that makes some literary people insist so strongly on the written tradition, our great-great-great... grandparents in writing, as it were.
Language survives. Without it no past, no history, no love, no memory beyond the animal, no self, no imagination of other worlds and states of being.