From the Yale Review (March 1959).
A GOOD DEAL OF NONSENSE has been written about “influence” in modern poetry, particularly the influence of one contemporary by another—by writers not very secure in their own practice who would have us believe that even their laundry notes are the result of divine visitation; by reviewers of limited taste and sensibility; by anthologists; and by the glib and middle-aging young who sometimes debase the role of enfant terrible by applying to the practice of criticism the methods—and often the taste—of the radio gagman.
For them it’s quite simple: any alliteration, any compounding, any enthusiasm before nature equals Hopkins; any concern with man in society or the use of two “definite” articles in a row is “Audenesque”; any associational shifting or developing a theme alternately, as in music, is Eliot; sexual imagery or a dense language structure, Thomas; and so on.
A little humility may be in order. Let us say that some people—often inarticulate simple types—can hear a poem, can recognize the real thing; far fewer know what a line is; and fewer yet, I suspect, are equipped to determine whether a writer has achieved his own tone, or whether he has been unduly influenced by another; for such a judgment involves a truly intimate knowledge not only of the particular writers concerned, but also the whole tradition of the language; a very exact medium sense; and a delicate and perceptive ear. I suggest that the central critical problem remains: whether a real poem has been created. If it has, the matter of influence becomes irrelevant. Think of the sons of Ben; think of Herbert. Is he any less a poet because he took over some of Donne’s effects? Is Auden a charlatan because he read and profited by reading Owen, Laura Riding, Robert Graves?
In a shrewd justification of the referential poem, or less charitably, the poem which is an anthology of other men’s effects, Eliot said, “Bad poets imitate; good poets steal.” In other words, take what you will with authority and see that you give it another, or even better life, in the new context.
All true, but in some ways a terrifying remark for the beginning writer, who is often neither bad nor good, but simply, as yet, unformed. He isn’t sure whether he is a thief or a fake. He may, critically, be far ahead of himself emotionally. He may be able to discuss, with real intelligence, Marvell or Pound or Stevens, but when he takes pen in hand the great models of the past may seem far away and even absurd, and the big names of his own time awesome, overwhelming. Particularly if he is a provincial far from a good library, or from any practicing poet, the immediately preceding literary generation, or the more precocious around his own age—and not always the best of these—may exercise a powerful attraction. The sensitive young are always acutely conscious of “fashion,” highly aware of the topical, the surfaces of life; there is a peculiar sheen of contemporaneousness—the phrase may be Huxley’s—which seems to exist to speak to them alone. They may be attracted by those writers who reflect their own confusions: the roaring-ass “primitive” produced on both sides of the Atlantic; or they can turn to the overneat technicians who simplify experience by forcing it into an arbitrary order.
To such a young man in such a state I introduce the following examples, my own transgressions, in the hope he will take heart and do otherwise:
THIS LIGHT
This light is the very flush of spring; it is innocent and warm;
It is gentle as celestial rain; it is mellow as gold;
Its pure effulgence may unbind the form
Of a blossoming tree; it may quicken fallow mould.
This light is various and strange; its luminous hue
May transmute the bleakest dust to silver snow;
Its radiance may be caught within a pool, a bead of dew;
It may contract to the sheerest point; it may arch to a bow.
This light is heaven’s transcendent boon, a beam
Of infinite calm; it will never cease;
It will illuminate forever the aether-stream;
This light will lead me to eventual peace.
This example illustrates, certainly, at least two things: a wrong choice of diction; an unfortunate use of a model. The model is Elinor Wylie; the moral is: don’t imitate an imitator; pastiche begets pastiche.
One of the great and early temptations is Beautiful Words. How they shimmer, those mellifluous counters that others have used so often. It’s the stage Yeats was at when he murmured, “Words alone are certain good,” against which can be set Hopkins’s “Words alone are only words.” But even Hopkins cared for “lovely” for instance.
Now I didn’t clutch a copy of Wylie in one hand, and write the piece with the other. Actually, I had been reading a lot of Vaughan, and a friend of mine suggested I do a poem on “Light.” I took—I suppose from Wylie—the devices of metaphor on a string—as in her piece
This sorrow was small and vulnerable and short-lived;
It was neither earth nor stone;…
which itself derives, I believe, from Shelley.
To adopt the technical device was legitimate: my real blunder was not to make the poem better: it’s static; it doesn’t develop; the epithets have too much to do; the last line is a banality.
My next spiritual romance was with Léonie Adams—something else again: her rhythms far subtler and more varied, a much richer aura of suggestiveness.
Listen to this:
THE BUDS NOW STRETCH
The buds now stretch into the light,
The warm air stirs the fertile bough,
The sap runs free, and in the night
The young emergent leaf is cast;
The leaf is cast, and garish now,
And drunk with mellow gold, the green
Shapes to the accurate wind, though fast
Upon the branch are laggard leaves,
Their shade not finger-dies, but soon
Their patterns swing into the light
And broaden in the blaze of noon.
The substance of the tree is hung,
And all its loveliness unbound,
Its emerald leaves to sky are flung;
But that sweet vertical, the sun,
Repeats those leaves upon the ground
To deepen half a summer field.
And still as dreams that lovely yield
Of shadows bound like garnered sheaves,
A harvest of immobile shade:
But when those shadows move, a sound,
The full and level noise of leaves.
It’s the Adams cadence, the hurrying of syllables into speech, as in:
It was my life, or so I said,
And I did well, forsaking it,
To go as quickly as the dead.
The technical trick is in the manipulation of the pause, the caesura, on the fourth and sixth syllables. But, alas, there are verbal, as well as rhythmical echoes: in “Kennst du das Land,” this Adams has a line
Knew the leaves deepening the green ground.…
While I say
To deepen half a summer field.
Maybe that’s not so reprehensible; but she also says, elsewhere,
As sweet as bones which stretch from sleep;
and in “Country Summer”:
And full and golden is the yield
And still as dreams that lovely yield
Of shadows bound like garnered sheaves.
I hate to abandon that poem: I feel it’s something Miss Adams and I have created: a literary lovechild. Put it this way: I loved her so much, her poetry, that I just had to become, for a brief moment, a part of her world. For it is her world, and I had filled myself with it, and I had to create something that would honor her in her own terms. That, I think, expresses as best I can what really goes on with the hero- or heroine-worshiping young. I didn’t cabbage those effects in cold blood; that poem is a true release in its way. I was too clumsy and stupid to articulate my own emotions: she helped me to say something about the external world, helped me convince myself that maybe, if I kept at it, eventually I might write a poem of my own, with the accent on my own speech.
Thus, one can stake out an area of subject matter, hoard up a body of words, even embody fresh observation in a sustained rhythm, in a poem all of a piece, and still be too close to somebody else. I limit myself to passages:
Diffuse the outpourings of the spiritual coward,
The rambling lies invented for the sick.
O see the fate of him whose guard was lowered!—
A single misstep and we leave the quick.
or
The winds of hatred blow
Cold, cold across the flesh
And chill the anxious heart;
Intricate phobias grow
From each malignant wish
To spoil collective life.
Now each man stands apart.
That, of course, is Wystan Hugh Auden, himself a real magpie, with a cormorant’s rapacity and the long memory of the elephant. He pillages the past, as in
from “The Cutty Wren”:
“Oh where are you going?” says Milder to Malder.
Or the present; here is Graves’s “Full Moon”:
As I walked out that sultry night,
I heard the stroke of One.
The moon, attained to her full height,
Stood beaming like the sun:
She exorcized the ghostly wheat
To mute assent in love’s defeat,
Whose tryst had now begun.
The fields lay sick beneath my tread.
And Auden himself opens up a ballad:
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And writes an entirely different poem. Now whether his conscious or unconscious mind seized on these elements: the “As I walked out,” the street, the wheat, the fields, makes no difference. And it’s perfectly possible that he might never have seen Graves’s poem, or even written his earlier. But Auden, when he does take over a technical device or even another attitude, for the moment, does so with assurance and style. Invariably the poem moves into its own life.
Is this ever the case in my own practice? Well, I offer this as, possibly, an influence survived:
THE DANCE
Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I’ll sing and whistle romping with the bears.
For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice,—
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!—
This animal remembering to be gay.
I tried to fling my shadow at the moon,
The while my blood leaped with a wordless song.
Though dancing needs a master, I had none
To teach my toes to listen to my tongue.
But what I learned there, dancing all alone,
Was not the joyless motion of a stone.
I take this cadence from a man named Yeats;
I take it, and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain.
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.
Oddly enough, the line “I take this cadence, etc.” is, in a sense, a fib. I had been reading deeply in Ralegh, and in Sir John Davies; and they rather than Willie are the true ghosts in that piece.
Is it an effrontery to summarize? Imitation, conscious imitation, is one of the great methods, perhaps the method of learning to write. The ancients, the Elizabethans, knew this, profited by it, and were not disturbed. As a son of Ben, Herrick more than once rewrote Jonson, who, in turn, drew heavily on the classics. And so on. The poems are not less good for this: the final triumph is what the language does, not what the poet can do, or display. The poet’s ultimate loyalty—the phrase belongs to Stanley Kunitz—is to the poem. The language itself is a compound, or, to change the figure, a bitch. The paradoxical thing, as R.P. Blackmur said of some of the young in the thirties, is that the most original poets are the most imitative. The remark is profound: if a writer has something to say, it will come through. The very fact he has the support of a tradition, or an older writer, will enable him to be more himself—or more than himself.
In a time when the romantic notion of the inspired poet still has considerable credence, true “imitation” takes a certain courage. One dares to stand up to a great style, to compete with papa. In my own case, I should like to think I have overacknowledged, in one way or another, my debt to Yeats. One simple device provides, I believe, an important technical difference: in the pentameter, I end-stop almost every line—a thing more usual when the resources of the language were more limited. This is not necessarily a virtue—indeed, from many points of view, a limitation. But it is part of an effort, however clumsy, to bring the language back to bare, hard, even terrible statement. All this Yeats himself, a bowerbird if there ever was one, would have understood, and, possibly, approved.