I agree, Tim. I am the first to admit that Eliot was greatly influenced by French Symbolist poets etc. It’s not so much that those influences don’t matter historically, but rather their influence has been, like it or not, filtered through Eliot et al. to such an extent that it is Eliot et al. who made the dissemination of theses influences universally acceptable.
Original Message:
Again, this Anglo-American bias.
Of course a lot of people across the English speaking world still
write poetry as if there was no Waste Land or Joyce or Stein, but not
all poets from the English speaking countries ignored what was
happening in Europe - if they did we would not have had the good stuff
that we had. Why is it that the huge French influence on American
poetry (particularly the later stuff, as the early French things
gradually got translated and gradually began to seep in) still gets
sidelined - a lot of commentators seem to restrict the extent of this
to Ashbery.
Brit avant and innovative poetry definitely had its roots as much in
European stuff as it did American - it depends on the poet of course.
i've always found the Spanish influence on America, particularly
through Lorca, talked about a lot more than the French one.
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