Seventy years ago, at the age of four, I first fell in love with poetry. Although I was born in Bronx, New York, I read and wrote Yiddish as a child, and I met some of the best poets who came to the United States later, such as Moses L. halpern, Manny Lei Bai, H. Revik and Jacob Gladstein. Thanks to the Bronx Library melrose Branch, where I soon taught myself English by reading a lot of British and American poems. My early hobbies, such as my preference for Vicky Lindsay, still haunt my vague memory. I gradually read all kinds of poems in my own way. When I was ten or twelve years old, I had fallen in love with william blake and Hart Crane. I read their poems repeatedly, recited them effortlessly, and began to have a hidden understanding of them until many years later.
Sometimes my close friends of poets ask me why I don't write poems myself. In fact, from the beginning, poetry was a mysterious art to me. Walking into the door of poetry not only means becoming a reader who enjoys reading, but also means embarking on a sacred beginning. I have been reading Blake and Klein's works, and they have also introduced me to Shelley, Wallace Stevenson, Ye Zhi, Milton and finally Shakespeare.
I'm not sure when I started to understand more about the poems I reread. Self-study has its shortcomings (until now my English pronunciation is still a little strange), but it is an effective weapon against monotony, including politics, religion, philosophy or just as a criticism of fashion monotony. T s Eliot's poems fascinate me, but I don't like his dogmatic prose. When I was about fifteen years old, I read Sacred Forest and Following Unusual Gods. I don't like the latter one. The former one made me depressed, but at least it led me to D.H. Lawrence. Eliot accused his works of being extremely rude, which attracted me.
My poetry critic's first love was G Wilson Knight. After a long time, I have a personal relationship with him and admire him very much. When I was 0/7 years old, I became a freshman at Cornell University. At that time, I bought northrop Frye's excellent book "Terrible Symmetry" and read it page by page. I was Frye's disciple for almost twenty years, until one morning in the summer of 1967, when it was my birthday. I woke up from a nightmare and began to write a wonderful fantasy article, Masked Angel, or the Influence of Poetics. After many revisions, the book was published in 1973 under the title of Anxiety of Influence, but Frye had already criticized the book at that time, because I presented the first edition to him in September 1967, and since then, we have reached an agreement: to keep our evaluation of poetry inconsistent forever.