The anxiety of influence

I have been to several exhibitions over the last few weeks and have been aware how important earlier artists have been to the ones that follow them. The exhibition that interested me most was the Delacroix at the National Gallery which specifically looked at Delacroix’s influence on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. There was a BBC programme on the exhibition on 22nd February 2016: ‘We all paint in Delacroix’s language,’ said Cezanne. ‘You can find us all in Delacroix”

The second exhibition, which I visited, set out to invite new artists to respond to old ones:

The Unexpected at the Ben Uri Art Gallery in London: “Both individually and collectively, the featured works touch on themes of journeys, displacement, loss, memory and identity, evoking powerful and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions and responses.”

The third exhibition I visited was the Hall Collection of Andy Warhol pictures at the Ashmolean Institute in Oxford.

And who influenced Andy Warhol? Marcel Duchamp. Andy Warhol met Duchamp and readily acknowledged his influence. Cezanne and his fellow painters were similarly not at all anxious about influence. Nor is the curator of the Unexpected at the Ben Uri.

The phrase “anxiety of influence” was coined by the American literary critic, Harold Bloom in his eponymous book about poets, published in 1973. And writers have been worrying about it ever since.

Visual artists seem less worried. In every exhibition you go to, you see art students sitting in front of a painting, photograph or installation, making written and visual notes, ready to be influenced. You don’t get that kind of public evidence with writers but the fear of copying, of plagiarism, of giving in to pastiche and parody, or even re-appropriation, is instilled into writing students. At the same time, as tutors, we encourage our students to look at and read the work of other artists or writers: it is the best way to learn how to do it yourself. Coincidentally, it is interesting that in the OCA Creative Arts Today course, the third assignment is specifically on the exploration of re-appropriation.

Bloom decided there were six ways new poets might be influenced by those who have gone before them. He gave the responses Greek names, see here.
Basically, we can simplify this into first two kinds of influence where the more recent poet recognises the work of the earlier poet and either corrects their viewpoint, or accepts it and moves forward. The second two represent a situation where the more recent poet completely breaks with the earlier one, or recognises the influence but breaks nevertheless in order to show their own superiority. In the last two cases the new writer diminishes their own and their predecessor’s work, or in contrast, reads their own in the light of their predecessor.
I guess as student writers and tutors we probably need to go for a happy medium – maybe for the very last one in Bloom’s list of six kinds of influence. I know there are novelists who say they do not wish to, or cannot bring themselves to read another novel while they are in the middle of writing one themselves. And certainly as a poet, I don’t want to read too widely while I am writing a sequence which has its own agendas and intricacies that I want to make sure are original and stay original. But whatever ideas I have, even when I think they are highly original, are more than likely based on a sum of all my reading in the past, both prose and poetry, and script and drama for that matter. I attend a poetry workshop run by Peter and Ann Sansom at the Poetry Business each month in Sheffield. There are usually up to 30 poets, some well-known and published, others just starting out but we are all there to get a stimulus for new writing and some feedback on poems already written. The morning is given over to quick four-minute responses to poems by other poets – so there’s an immediate influence on what and how we might write.
In the afternoon we split into two groups and workshop poems already written, so there we are again taking on suggestions from other poets about our own writing. Just as Wilfrid Owen listened to suggestions from Siegfried Sassoon when they were both in Craiglockhart Hospital with shell shock during the First World War. So even if you don’t live in Sheffield (lots of people come from all over Yorkshire, Manchester, Leicestershire and even as far afield as London and Cumbria) try the Poetry Business Writing Days, usually the last Saturday in the month.
Perhaps we could share information about other workshop facilitators, not only for poetry, but for fiction, non-fiction and scriptwriting. And of course for the visual arts.
Learning and teaching imply a willingness to be influenced by others. I reckon we all need to get rid of the anxiety and use influence as a positive factor in our practice.