From a 2019  Literary Hub interview with A. E. Stallings:

PM: What is it about Classical myth, culture, poetry that has proved seemingly inexhaustible to you as a subject, jumping off place, or portal by and through which you make your poems?

AS: There is, in the first place, so much of it. I am always learning new things, rereading things in a new light, rereading things from a different point in life. And as an imaginative map, it is a map with a lot of uncharted places. It is both now and not now. Women’s voices in ancient epic and lyric tend to be “unrecorded” (as how Penelope’s thoughts are always veiled—her name means veiled, in one etymology) or fragmented (as has simply happened to Sappho through no fault of hers) which is a lot of space for improvisation. I suppose the Athenian tragedians found the same thing.

That said, certain other tales and mythologies have a similar draw on me—Anderson’s and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and the Alice of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

PM: I wonder specifically about you as a poet of what is both unconscious or mysterious—what observations might you have about that aspect of your writing in relationship to, or in opposition to, what we’ve been discussing about the technical effects of poems. 

AS: Frost famously said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I would perhaps add, no discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader. Ancient poets believed that they had access to knowledge and wisdom beyond their own human experience because of the divine intervention of the Muses. I also believe that. Inspiration is a state of receptiveness to things larger than or other than oneself, a kind of empathy not necessarily with people but with objects, slants of light, shadows, and the sounds of things. A good line is always a little bit of a mystery. You learn to trust things you don’t necessarily understand intellectually (Keats’ Negative Capability, in a nutshell). This doesn’t always get easier with time and experience. The more experienced in a technique you become, the harder it can be to surprise yourself. Paradoxically, I like things like rhyme and meter precisely because using these random limitations (as a more avant garde poet might say) can leave you open to things beyond your control, spaces for the Muse to move through.