I can't believe I missed this! Thanks.
"The composition of a good poem is roughly analogous to a successful feat of detection: The poet seeks a precise sequence of words that can be as agonizingly hard to discover as the truth behind appearances that is (for a Spade or Marlowe or Archer) the holy grail."
This is a great insight, but I can't help feeling it's still just another analogy for detective work of a larger scope; I just can't put my finger on it. It's some kind of transcendence.
Someone should write a book on this.