a need to answer

An artist, Pinsky writes, “needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond. The promise may be a contradiction, it may be unwanted, it may go unheeded…but it is owed, and the sense that it is owed is a basic requirement for the poet’s good feeling about the art. This need to answer, as firm as a borrowed object or a cash debt, is the ground where the centaur walks.”

Robert Pinsky in Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry.