Poetry is conversation, and poets like to sit at an imaginary table, agreeing with what was said by other poets, chafing at their arguments, avoiding or responding (directly or indirectly) to their assertions. This conversation is the stuff of culture, and without the rough-and-tumble of what scholars often loosely call "influence," there would be no poetry. There is a further layer here, contained in a phrase from T.S. Eliot, "under the sign," that Christopher Ricks—critic, poet, and professor of humanities at Boston University, to say nothing of one of the finest readers of poetry in our time—uses in his new book, True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (Yale University Press). Eliot used the suggestive phrase in a letter, saying that four poems in his earliest collection were written "sous le signe de Laforgue"; what that means, I suspect, is that Eliot felt conscious of Laforgue's presence while writing those poems. He felt the sway of his precursor, his guiding intellect, a certain dry ironic tone that he found useful in his own verse at the moment of writing. Critics have long discussed "influence," often in vague terms, and there is a never-ending stream of influence studies within academe—as in Harold Bloom's idiosyncratic but suggestive sequence of books in the 1970s and 80s, beginning with The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Bloom famously "theorized" the concept of influence by putting the process within the framework of Freudian psychoanalysis and its anxiety principle. He saw poets in perpetual conflict with those who went before them. Weak poets, in his view, depended too heavily on those whom they imitated; strong poets necessarily pulled away from their influences as they struggled to create voices of their own, often engaging in a process of misreading, which Bloom mapped in elaborate ways. Needless to say, the Bloomian notion was fraught for poets, as they looked over their shoulders with a sense of terror. Influence became an obstacle to creativity. In my view, that seems a mistaken notion, however intriguing for critics. Perhaps as we think about poetry this month—National Poetry Month—we may reconsider the idea of influence. I would argue that poets have always thought of themselves as participating in a larger conversation, and that anxiety is not necessarily involved. . . .
Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Dead-Poets-Society/64989/.
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