Some Musings About Influence

I finished Homer’s Iliad (Fagles translation) last night (it’s been my subway reading since the turn of the year) and had my hairs stand on end when I read these lines by the ghost of Patroclus speaking to Achilles: “So now let a single urn, the gold two-handled urn / your noble mother gave you, hold our bones–together!” It was the first time in the poem I felt more than just a bond of friendship between these two men, but that’s not why I felt so charged.  The charge came from the echo I heard of the closing lines in “What I Preach I Preach For the Sake of What We Excavate” (forthcoming in Knockout #3).  That poem takes a cue from John Donne’s “The Relic,” but now here I find it is also in conversation with this passage from The Iliad, a passage I wasn’t even aware of when I composed it.  “What I Preach…” has a new layer now when I read it, as it touches the ghosts of Donne, of Homer, Patroclus and Achilles.