I find what Richard says revealing. For one thing, he mentions no lyrical poets (unless you count Stein, but she isn't a poet--no, Tender Buttons is prose--and what lyricism is in her work is generally overwhelmed by her modes of expression. Richard does not do lyric poetry. For another, they divide into the "experimental" and the extremely accessible unexperimental--as does Richard's work. Finally, it is extremefully characteristic of Richard to say things like "the very top" to describe artists he favors. These five would be "at the very top" for very few besides him, I believe. They aren't even in the third rank, for me. None--but maybe Ellison, whose one admired novel I've never read--produced anything that can be called a masterpiece. For instance, I consider Cage's experiments with silence amusing and even interesting, but not finally aesthetically rewarding--though much better uses of silence by others have followed.

My pantheon of literary models would include the Joyce of Finnegans Wake and Cummings for innovation, and Joyce's Ulysses is certainly one of the greatest novels of all time, perhaps the greatest, while Cummings produced a dozen or more poems as good as any in the language. My literary pantheon would include a lot more writers than Richard mentions. My initial pantheon, covering just the writers I was influenced by before I turned 21, would include Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Fitzgerald as translater of the The Rubaiyat, Thomas Wolfe, Bierce, Twain and Cummings; and Shakespeare, Wilde and Shaw in playwriting. My pantheon at 25 would have Emerson, Nietzsche, Mencken, Basho and Buson. Probably others. Stevens and Roethke entered later. I know I'm leaving out important others. I'm also leaving out writers I've greatly admired but was not influenced by, like C. P. Snow.

Fun subject, I think.

One huge difference between Richard and me is that I've been more influenced by writers younger than I than I have by probably all but a few of the dead writers I've been influenced by. I don't think Richard has been much influenced by writers younger than he. Among those on my literary pantheon of writers younger than I who have significantly influenced me would be Scott Helmes, Marton Koppany, Karl Kempton, Jake Berry, Geof Huth, Crag Hill, Aram Saroyan, Kathy Ernst. I'm definitely leaving people out. Apologies to them. One advantage of doing this at a blog is that I can always add names.