----- Original Message ----- 
From: "andrew burke" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2007 8:04 PM
Subject: Re: influences


> What an interesting list, Fred.  Andrew
>
> On 29/07/07, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Robinson Jeffers
>> E. A. Robinson
>> George Oppen
>> Charles Reznikoff
>> Milosz
>> Zbigniew Herbert
>> Shelley
>> H.D.
>> Gunnar Ekelof
>> Montale
>> Yannis Ritsos
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Andrew



Yeah, and top-of-my-head honest.  Only way I could select from a cast of 
thousands was to forget any name but those I genuinely like rather than 
respect.  The poet I'm most conscious of "being in the ring with," in Norman 
Mailer's phrase, is Yeats.  The poet I've been most flattered by being 
compared to is Auden.  And the poet I'd most like to live up to (leaving 
Blake aside, the way one leaves Shakespeare aside) is Holderlin.  But I 
didn't think of any of them.  One other name I'll mention, really obscure, 
is that of Angelos Sikelianos.  (NOT Eleni.)  1884-1951.  One translation, 
by Edmund Keeley, Princeton U Press.  Here's the end of his  "Attic," a 
talisman poem for me:

"May I never wake from this dream ...
When we reach the sea - the heat
moving us to spur our horses
and to press them forward, prowlike,

into the waves - we may then wake up
again within time's contradictions
and split the miracle between
sudden exultation and the multifarious struggle."

"Do you still live with a divided impulse,
brother?  Haven't you yet freed
from the fine soil of this earth
the body that is mystically consummated,

like the cicada rising from the tomb
to settle on the highest branch,
watching over the earth, the sun and the gods,
with a simple hymn of resurrection?

But we who have so often triumphed over death,
brother, and have dispelled the darkness
of times like these, now travel toward the indivisible
and become, continually, younger than youth itself!

And that which we still don't see
perhaps our horses can divine
because, look, in mid-stride they've begun
to chew their bits, prance, tread

the air, as though all of a sudden they want
to change their gait and, in this ancient lane
- grip your bridle, brother, and let them go! -
transform their gallop into winged flight.

No, it's not an illusion
for us to ride a dream on this godlike day
when everything, visible and invisible, we and the heroes 
and the gods too
move forward inside the same eternal sphere!".