Louise Penny on the role of poetry in her novels

I just ran across this helpful quotation from Louise Penny on how important poetry is to her mysteries:

"Robert Frost said that for him, ‘A poem begins as a lump in the throat’. For me a book begins that way. Some emotion strongly felt. I always advise emerging writers to read poetry because it’s all about emotion. And a surgical choice of words. ‘I was much too far out all of my life/And not waving but drowning’—the great Stevie Smith lines. Or Auden’s, ‘Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge/his terror had to blow itself quite out/to let him see it.’ What better inspiration for novels of the heart—and that’s what crime novels, at their best, are about. Not the cold-blooded crime, but the hot emotion that led to the thrust. Yes, for the most part, I decide on the overarching emotion of a book, and then watch it played out in the characters. All my books are inspired by poems. The Beautiful Mystery is inspired by TS Eliot’s "Murder in the Cathedral". The work in progress by "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner". Paradise Lost plays a role in most of my works."

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadawrites/2012/05/louise-penny-help-desk-part-3.html