Usually poems, like speech, take shape in the doing. Whatever I start with, whatever subject or form, changes as I write or talk. I imagine it’s this way for most writers and talkers.
I understand Mary’s point about form as saying that the content of poems often doesn’t add up to much, as any paraphrase will show. Go through Petrarch’s or Shakespeare’s sonnets and paraphrase them: not much is left. The poem’s form—not just rhyme and meter, but phrasing, sentence structure, wordplay, etc.—is, in a certain (and not necessarily gobbledegooky) sense, what the poem is saying. Of course, if the content lacked passion or something that matters to people, the form wouldn't matter either.
Remembering that Yeats’s “Cuchulain Comforted” started with a journal entry, which he turned into terza rima (transforming it as he went), I searched online to find that journal entry, but it did not turn up. Instead, I found this from an article on Yeats by Eric Ormsby, referring to a book that reproduces Yeats’s working manuscripts:
What the drafts demonstrate most compellingly is that for Yeats composition did not entail the elaboration of “ideas;” indeed, all his ideas were conspicuously second-hand. Rather, the writing of a poem involved the discovery of a musical argument. The propositions of the poem to be written were inordinately clear (for at least one poem Yeats even wrote a prose summary beforehand); it was the music that remained to be discovered.
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