The web currently abounds with pages of advice on how to start writing a poem when you're not inspired. One can forgive, nay even sympathise with, the resident or laureate poet who's obliged to deliver on demand, but for us who are not under contract or obligation it seems to me bizarre, and indeed lamentable, to write for the sake of writing without having anything of importance to say. Why one would want to do so is an interesting conundrum, but here I'm primarily concerned with the still open question of what inspiration actually is. That's rather important , as you need some kind of definition in order to know whether you've got it or not at a given moment.

The dominant position in the past was that an external personified 'muse' provided periodic inspiration by some form of telepathy unknown to science (or indeed to art). However I tend to agree with Laura Riding that what we call inspiration comes from inside, albeit (my qualification) often triggered by external events. That said, if the poet was male the classic muse was in practice usually his girlfriend or mistress 1 (only rarely, it seems, his wife as in the case of John Masefield). Robert Graves asserted (although without offering any solid evidence) that this is because the ordinary round of domesticity is inimical to poetic inspiration, although a mass of free verse seems to concentrate quite contentedly on the minutiae of the domestic round these days.

Suffice it to say there's a possibility that the generally heightened sensibilities associated with being in (or falling out of) a loving relationship may enable mental processes conducive to creative output. Nevertheless, it seems from extensive examination of the backgrounds of poets who've produced both excellent and rather ordinary poetry that the best has often been produced while reacting to, or in the immediate aftermath of, specific exceptionally stressful events or circumstances rather than out of continuous states of being. For example, the most powerful and memorable poems by Natalya Gorbanyevskaya were written (or at least conceived) while under arrest and while suffering severe sanctions for participating in political protest in the USSR. After her emigration to the safety of Paris, despite maintaining her technical excellence, she produced much less interesting, indeed rather ordinary and unmemorable, work.

Or take the case of Graves. Of the over 600 poems in his 1975 collected works, a mere half dozen really strike one as amazing, and about the same number as cleverly constructed but otherwise not outstanding. And when one examines his life history, it emerges that both most of the striking poems and some of the well crafted but lesser were written around times of upheaval in his life.

On the other hand, not so long ago (and I'm probably not alone in this) I was out shopping for groceries when an entire poem – words and form – leapt into my mind and stuck there until I got home and wrote it down a full hour or so later. The poem had nothing to do with shopping or groceries, and subsequently needed only a couple of minor adjustments to perfect it.

So, given that both heightened mental excitation and its absence can trigger the creation of both exceptional and ordinary poems, how far have we got towards explaining inspiration? I suspect we've been pursuing the wrong rabbit down the wrong rabbit hole, and that something we've overlooked is really going on.

I 'd like to suggest that it's intuition.

Intuition has been, and still is, almost universally misunderstood. Definitions range from some ineffable 'feminine' capacity to an assumption that it's essentially the same as wild guesswork. But it's neither. Intuition essentially manifests itself as sudden, apparently spontaneous, recognition of some valid concept in its finished form. But this needs to be qualified, as ideas can emerge apparently fully formed as a result of guesswork too (although the latter ultimately prove flawed on close examination).

I 've only ever met one person who provided a convincing argument for the difference. Several years ago I attended a lecture by the last living cryptographer from the WW2 Bletchley Park. He mentioned that the problems they had to solve required intuition, so I suggested quietly to the lady sitting next to me that it can be difficult to decide whether it's really intuition at work. She unexpectedly but very wisely replied that is isn't difficult at all. If you don't get the right answer, it's not intuition but just guesswork. And, contemplating this later I realised the reason – for intuition to work you have to be already in possession subconsciously of all the necessary information. Until you intuit, you just haven't, so to speak, put the jigsaw together despite having all the pieces to hand. This is a right brain activity, whereas guesswork is the left brain scrabbling for bits of a puzzle that may or may not even exist.

So what relevance has that to the question of poetic inspiration? If you accept that inspiration is an outcome of intuition, two things are required. Firstly, you must already be in possession of all the necessary information, and secondly, you can't force it to happen. The right brain operates in its own time without intruding into consciousness, so you must wait until it delivers its results. For a poet, obtaining all the necessary information happens gradually out of wide and deep involvement in life plus highly tuned perception (otherwise known as experience). And the necessary tool for the waiting is patience.

Consequently, returning to our initial question of whether it's worth it (or even possible) to pursue inspiration (on the same lines, I suppose, as the American 'pursuit of happiness'), my answer is 'no' – to intuit is not a voluntary act, so neither is inspiration voluntary. What you will find sometimes is that something you're doing or experiencing will apparently quite arbitrarily trigger an intuition about something else (sometimes completely different) that has been developing undetected for some time.

You'll be taken by surprise when it happens, but the results will probably be worth it. So immerse yourself in life and tune your capacities for perception and attention, both to provide the maximum number of pieces for possible future jigsaw puzzles and to maximise the number of possible trigger events. I suppose this might be referred to as 'seeking inspiration' but making it a conscious purpose is likely to thwart the effect. The conscious left brain becomes preoccupied by the act of seeking, distracting from possible recognition of what is being sought – just as being told not to think of an elephant typically causes one to think of nothing else.

 [1] As I'm a bloke I can't comment on any equivalence to the male poet's female muse in the case of female poets, but I'm open to comments on this. Although as the concept is based on a fallacy anyway, it's probably not that important.