The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?
Nothing in the outer world makes you feel any way. You decide what you want to feel, and then use outer people and events as permission slips to execute your feeling agenda.
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.