"invent and abide by a system"

This stood out from a recent, short interview with Yusef Komunyakaa:

I believe meaning is primary and not a tangled connundrum. That doesn’t mean that everything has to be on the surface of the poem.  One has to invent and abide by a system of asthetics.

This reminded me of the thesis of an essay from the The Art of Sylvia Plath, edited by Charles Newman (1970).  In her essay "The World as Icon: On Sylvia Plath's Themes," Annette Lavers writes that Plath's poems

derive their meaning, both profound and sometimes literal, from an underlying code, in which objects and their qualities are endowed with stable significations, and hierarchized.  It is indeed only because such a pre-ordained scheme (probably unconscious to a great extent) existed that such a large output, of such quality, was made possible.  ....

Recognition of this fact ... sheds light on what Sylvia Plath was trying to do with her poetry.  She was not trying to render each experience by means uniquely suited to it, but rather to dominate such experiences by making them fit (sometimes with difficulty) within a previously adopted framework, which automatically results in their being integrated in a scale of values. 

Conscious (or unconscious) adoption by a poet of an invented system, code or framework, then, coheres a body of work.