The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.

Duffy frames inspiration not as a rare, mystical lightning strike but as a responsive process: anything that leaves a strong enough mark on the mind—recollection, the textures of words themselves, imaginative invention, or lived experience—can precipitate a poem once it finds linguistic shape. The emphasis falls on “impression” and “form,” suggesting that art begins when perception becomes pressure: an internal force that demands articulation. By listing memory, language, imagination, and experience side by side, she also refuses a hierarchy of sources, implying that craft and attentiveness matter as much as autobiography. Inspiration, in this view, is democratic and ubiquitous, but it becomes poetry only when it coheres into language.