You collect the saga, and you hand it on. Well, then they, the next generation, will keep it and they'll hand it on. That's the kind of continuity which is our only immortality. Poetry distills experience. I say to students all the time, life is not art.
Art is something that takes a step beyond.
It transmutes what you take out of life experience and enables you to build on it. As a writer, you have a gift for simply following your own impulses. I don't really see the direction that something has taken until it takes it. You just have to be open. I know that.