Strong Poets create (poetic) history by misreading each other, so as to to create imaginative space for themselves. (5)
Poets as poets cannot accept substitutions, and fight to the end to have their initial chance alone. (8)
The "creative mind's desperate insistence upon priority." (13)
Valentinius, second-century Gnostic speculator, came out of Alexandra o teach the Pleroma, the Fullness of thirty Aeons, manifold of Divinity: "it was a great marvel that they were in the father without knowing Him." To search for where you already are is the most benighted and of quests, and the most fated. Each strong poet's Muse, his Sophia, leaps as far out and down as can be, in a solhipfistic passion of quest. Valentinous posited a Limit, at which the quest ends, but no quest ends, if it's context is Unconditioned Mind, the cosmos of the greatest post-Miltonic poets. The Sophia of Valentinius recovered, we'd again within the Pleroma, and her only Passion or Dark Intention was separated out into out world, beyond the Limit. Into thisPassion, this Dark Intention that Valentinius called "strengthless and female fruit," the ephebe must fall. If he emerges from it, however crippled and blinded, he will be among the strong poets. (14)
There and then, in this bad, he finds good; he chooses the heroic, to know damnation and to explore the limits of the possible within it. The alternative is to repent, to accept God as altogether other than the self, wholy external to the possible. This God is cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more. But we, to understand the strong poet, must go further still than he can go into the poise before the consciousness of falling came. (21)
For why do men write poems? To rally everything that remains, and not to sanctify or propound... (satan finding what must suffice). (22)
Poetic influence, as time has tarnished it, is part of the larger phenomenon of intellectual revisionism... The ancestor of revisionism is heracy, but heresy tended to Chang received doctrine by alteration of balances, rather than by what could be called creative correction, the more particular mark of modern revisionism. (28-29)
To be pure spirit, yet to know in oneself the limit of opacity; to assert that one goes back before the Creation-Fall, yet to be forced to yield to number, weight, and measure; this is the situation of a strong poet, the capable imagination, when he confronts the universe of poetry, the words that were and will be, that terrible splendor of cultural heritage. (32)
The clinamen or swerve, which is the Urizenic equivalent of the hapless errors of of re-creation made by the Platonic demiurge, is necessarily the central working concept of the theory of Poetic Influence, for what divides each poet from his Poetic Father (and so saves, by division) is an instance of creative revisionism... The poet so stations his precursor, so swerves his context, that the visionary objects, with their higher intensity, fade into the continuum. The poet has, in regard to the precirsor's heterocosm, a shuddering sense of the arbitrary--of the equality, or equal haphazardness, of all objects. (42)
...the true history of modern poetry would be the accurate recording of these revisionary swerves.