Poems and Prayers

I've been thinking a bit about compiling the prayers and poems that I've written over the years together.  It's interesting for me to think about what I was feeling or seeing when I wrote them and recognize how my journey has ebbed and evolved and my perspective has been enlightened since those times.    I don't know how other authors feel about their writings, but mine are sacred to me.  Stephen James wrote once that writers are not born, they are made. That was certainly true in my case.  Most all of my writings came from what I was experiencing at the moment, or what I observed in the life of another person at the time.  But even when we write about someone else, we can only write well when we draw from the wells of our own soul's revelations, questions, and experiences.
But the nature of pen and paper is different than speaking.  Especially when it comes to poems and prayers or pieces of literature that capture a story or a feeling or a question.  They are never written in a vaccum.  When we speak about experiences we've gone through, we can talk about them through the rearview mirror, we have the video camera still playing forward.  A painting is the artist's interpretation of a scene in a given season, a camera captures an image of a moment, and a poem can be a culmination of an artist's experiences emotions and questions about a specific circumstance. 
But the question that tends to arise is this...are your poems and prayers still a reflection of your heart?
Are they true in the same way that they used to be?
Or is there a greater truth in them that lives beyond what birthed them?
Is there a greater truth in them that lives beyond even the author?
Those are important things to ask when you look at a body of writings.  I have most of Amy Carmichael's writings and they span over a half century of her life. I am able to look at her poems, her prose, her journals, her life, and the testimony of others and understand from a much larger perspective what meaning they have.  But my guess is that there is much she never shared.