Listening as influence

This article explores listening as a mode and a scene of influence in a number of Keats' and Wordsworth's poems, including ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' and ‘The Solitary Reaper', testing and extending a Bloomian model. I argue that listening offered a model of influence that could be convivial, sympathetic and receptive rather than combative. Where Bloom thinks about influence in a psycho-cultural longue durée, I suggest an alternative temporality grounded in close attention to the historical and to the local, to sounds of particular scenes of reading, listening and reading-as-listening and to the poem's aural dynamics. I demonstrate that by attending to the poem’s revisions and also to its acoustic texture, to rhymes, rhythms and shifts of verbal register, that is, by reading listeningly, we can understand the dynamics of influence at play.