[New-Poetry] Influential Poets, The Five

[James Cervantes]

Why must there be "ranking"?

- Jim

On 12/31/06, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net> wrote:
>
>
> I'm trying to get two Very Important Essays written before my Christmas
> vacation ends, so I should not be posting this, but will, anyway.  There are
> so many problems with assigning influentiality to any poet, it's hard to
> know how to make the word work.  Here's one question for those who take the
> word to mean what stasguards mean by it, which I take to be amount of time
> devoted to a poet's followers in college classrooms.  The question: who
> should be considered more influential, Smith, a poet who is the first to
> write poems about cows, and is follwed by a thousand mediocre poets all
> writing about cows, or Jones, a poet who is the first to use ink of
> different colors in poems and is followed by seven poets who write excellent
> poems doing that?  Or, who is more influential, a poet like Bukowski who has
> influenced a huge number of poets or a poet like Stevens who has influenced
> a smaller number of better poets?  A related question: who is the more
> influential poet, one who influences later poets to treat a certain subject
> in their poems that wasn't in poetry before him, or a poet who influences a
> much smaller number of poets to do something significantly new in poetry
> (yes, like including aesthetically-singificant graphics in them)?  Or a poet
> who is widely but trivially influential versus one whose influence is felt
> by only a few but is significant.
>
> My five, by the way: Whitman, Longfellow (probably still the most
> influential American poet if it's a matter of number of followers), Pound,
> Cummings, Williams.  Not counting poets in their prime after Plath (to
> follow Wiman's example).  And with the disclaimer that this list in without
> Crisman-level "thinking."  If I were to write about influential American
> poets, I'd have a longer list, and would have trouble ranking them.
>
> --Bob G.
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