The Influence of Poetry

    I memorized my first poem in third grade, a poem that so influenced me—those rhymes and rhythms, those images!— I still remember it, though I'll admit it took some hard work to dredge it from that ancient memory. I didn't look for it on the internet because I thought that would spoil the fun, but after I recalled the whole thing, I did look it up, so I can tell you that it's called "Indian Children" and is by Annette Wynne. It influenced me towards a life-long love of poetry, and of memorizing poetry, too, but also, more unconsciously, it influenced me by its "message": the recognition of other ways, the nonjudgemental tone, the emphasis on nature (of the Indian ways). 

      Later, when I was a teenager, struggling, like all teenagers, with what kind of person I wanted to be, I owned a thin volume of poems called 101 Famous Poems. (I still have the book.) I read the poems in this anthology again and again. Many of them I memorized. Some of the poems influenced me with their exhortations about how to live, such as Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"—

 

        "Tell me not in mournful numbers

        Life is but an empty dream

        For the soul is dead that slumbers,

        And things are not what they seem.

        Life is real! Life is earnest!

        And the grave is not its goal.

        To dust thou art, to dust returnest

        Was not said of the soul,

and Rudyard Kipling's "If"—"If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you," which continues with similar two-line conditional clauses that eventually end, I'm sorry to say, with "[If you can do all this] you'll be a man, my son." The gender reference grated, but I managed to ignore it in order to apply the advice to my own life. 

    My romantic, and searching, teen-age soul relished this kind of poetry I found in this book, whether at the poetic level of Shakespeare (Hamlet's soliloquy) and Emily Dickinson ("If I can stop one heart from breaking,/I shall not live in vain") or of Frank L. Stanton, who gave similar advice in worse poetry ("If you strike a thorn or a rose/Keep a-goin'/If it rains or if it snows/Keep a-goin'). In trying to understand life, I delved into the poems of death, such as William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis," with its love of nature, to which, the poem says, we return when we die.  I memorized poem after poem of this ilk, and if I didn't end up understanding life, at least these poems influenced me to think about life and what it meant and what I should make of mine. You can't say such words to yourself over and over without their having an influence on you. Poetry does that.

    Being a teenager and therefore between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, I was as influenced by the book's poems that taught their lessons with a lighter touch—"The Spider and the Fly," by Mary Howitt, for instance—as by poems of the gravity of "Thanatopsis." One of the wonderful things about reading this book at that age was that I responded entirely to the poem itself, regardless of the poet, who might have been as famous as Shakespeare or as unknown as Mary Howitt. I was also unsophisticated enough to not know whether the poem was good or bad—maudlin, sappy, sing-song, as some of them are—none of it mattered. If I liked the poem, I read it over and over and often memorized it just so I could say those lines— that beautiful language, that wisdom—whenever they occurred to me. Even today lines from those poems float through my mind from time to time. Isn't that what influence is?

    Besides the poems with life lessons, I was influenced, in the same anthology, by poems that played with language, such as Edgar Allen Poe's monotonously melodic poem "The Bells." I liked the poems that used a vernacular ("It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home/A heap of sun an' shadder, and ye sometimes have t' roam…"). I recited one of those vernacular poems, "Knee-Deep in June," by James Whitcomb Riley, in the high school variety show, dressed in overalls and straw hat, in keeping with the narrator of the poem. 

    "Knee-Deep in June" like "Indian Children," also illustrates a third influence from poetry: a relationship with nature. Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us" and "Daffodils," Bryant's "Thanatopsis," Sidney Lanier's "Song of the Chattahoochee," among others in 101 Famous Poems. Later in my literary studies and grown-up world the exhortative life-is-real-life-is-earnest poems fell out of favor with me, but the influence of nature poems has been a constant. 

    Nature poems and language-conscious poems have had the biggest influence not only in my life but in my writing. Gerard Manley Hopkins—huge influence. Wordsworth. Robinson Jeffers. At the same time, I am still, as I was as a teen-ager, influenced by poems that deal with life's depths: Kenneth Patchen's heartbreakingly beautiful and deeply despondent prose-poem "I Have No Place to Take Thee"; Wordworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us"; Hopkins's "Binsley Poplars," about the felling of a grove of his favorite trees, in which he says, "Oh, if we but knew what we do/When we delve and hew/Hack and rack the growing green." I can see the influence of such poems in how I write and what I write about, as I strive and strive to reach such beauty and such depth.

    Finally, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, of the fourteenth century, and Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene, of the sixteenth, both of which I studied thoroughly in college and graduate school, influenced me in the same way "Indian Children" did—by showing me, in the language of poetry, different ways of living and being. These two book-length poems touch on all aspects of life—the good and the evil, our struggles to live good lives, our loves and loyalties and fallacies, all in a beautiful poetry (oh, that vernacular!) with characters and plot and everything else that makes good literature influence how we live. 

    I love these great poems, as I still love a lot (but not all) of those earlier poems that influenced me. But this isn't a list of my favorite poems, although, of course, some of these are also some of my favorites, but a list of poems that have made a difference in my life. For them I am grateful.