Today, I just want to mention a few vagrant thoughts about influence (in the field of poetry only, though what I say will almost certainly apply to any other field). One is the (obvious) problem of distinguishing primary influence from secondary influence. For instance, if Poet#1 uses element A in a poem, and Poet#2 uses the same element after seeing it in Poet#1's poem, Poet#2 has been influenced by Poet#1, whether or not Poet#1 was the first poet ever to use element A or not. But if he was not, then Poet#2 was really influenced primarily by whatever poet Poet#1 got the element from, even if Poet#2 never heard of that poet.

If Poet#1 uses element A1, a completely original, significant variation on element A, in a poem, and Poet#2 then uses element A1 in a poem, then Poet#2 has been influence both by Poet#1 i whoever was the first to use element A in a poem.

A second problem is figuring out how much influence to "award" the person who first uses an element effectively when one or more others have previously used it ineffectively. Similarly, how influential should we call a poet who is not the first to use some significant element, but is the first to use it widely (as is the case more than a few times, I believe) with Cummings?

Related to all this is the problem of originality, another item whose definition people will no doubt argue about forever. I happen to believe in the huge originality of very slight newnesses. And also that the rediscovery of something is close to as important as valuable and as much an act of originality as its discovery was. Take Apollinaire's shaped calligrammes. Assuming they were the first visual poems in the twentieth century, I would call them significantly more than Lewis Carroll's earlier shaped poems--because they used shaping in serious poetry, a step different from Carroll's using shaping in light verse. As for Carroll, I'd grant him high status as an originator for rediscovering shaping as a poetic device.

Using the same kind of logic, I would label creators of advertising, graffiti artists, children's book illustrators, and the like, innovators and consequential precursors of visual poets, in many cases--but not therefore take away credit from actual serious visual poets for originality, primary originality. Ditto, poets who find valuable new elements in foreign or long-ago poetries and put them into their language for the first time. Especially, as not unseldom happens, they use them better than those they discovered them in, or use them in better poems than theirs.

No question, this is a vexed subject that much more can be said about. I'm floating ideas about it here, though I am fairly attached to them, at the moment. I can change my mind, though.

One more assertion: one can be a major poet without being a primary influence on anyone. I would claim Robert Frost was one such. Perhaps, Shakespeare, too. Certainly, Keats.