There is this interesting phenomenon in music perception that when the natural overtones of a certain tone are all present, the human auditory system hears that certain tone even when it is not actually there

Which is how the talented electronics nerds in industrial design manage to extract booming bass from tiny earphones - it is not actually there, it is all between your ears

Is that what poets do?  Strike an idea and carefully note down its overtones which happen to be representable in words? So that when we are lucky, the reader can reconstruct that which the tiny piece of writing can't possibly contain?