Hi Peter and Tim
Two more ruminations:
1 Novelty/Quality
I've often wondered about this. If you take away the pejorative overtones in "novelty" - let's replace it with "newness" or "originality" or "innovation" then I think the question about whether quality can be detached from newness becomes more interesting and ponderable.
Literary histories always privilege newness because they are interested in where things start. But many new things drop barren into the depths of the cultural ocean. New does not equal significant. Significance is determined not only by the artwork but by its public reception (I don't necessarily mean a large public, of course).
Can we admire a poem while at the same time believing it has no cultural significance and no newness? I like to think so. But the admiration would have to be of a certain type, perhaps like admiring an ordinary well-made coffee-cup. It would be an admiration we might feel no need to publicize, since we are conspicuously making no claims for greatness.
2 Influence
"some of the most important influences were quick flashes, something that could be got by reading a single poem."
That chimes with some of the things I've been thinking recently about this mysterious influence. Poetry is not distinct from other walks of life - we all know how people pick up a new catchphrase or meme after only hearing it once. The influence depends not on the intrinsic qualities of poet A's work but on what it ignites in poet B; poet B not necessarily in isolation, since we are all part of a larger cultural organism of receptivity.
It seems clear to me that early Ashbery and his pals often had that kind of instant seismic impact, like Finns and Germans hearing the Beatles; three minutes or one page would be enough to infect you.
But then again there are so many kinds of influence. The literary-historical picture of influence (Eliot being influenced by Corbiere or whatever) is an artificial construct that describes only one kind of influence and perhaps a rather special case: the case where an author claims to be conscious of an influence and claims a significance for it, wishes to publish it, is prepared to be associated with the influencer. But how well do we each really know what we are influenced by? Surely we have very imperfect insight into this subject. I am not really able to inspect my mind and report back on where my last verse came from, any more than I know where I first heard the word "receptivity" or who taught me how to spell "pejorative".
I'm starting to be interested in the unconscious influences that poet B doesn't even know about, the influences that don't come from poetry or even writing, the counter-intuitive influences where poet B draws something from poet A that nobody else would ever find there. I'm intrigued by the ordinary qualities of the mind and its capacity for composing fantastic dreams out of unlikely raw materials.
m icha el
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