recalling past voices

A poem…has the power to remind poet and reader alike of things they have read and heard. Also—and this is partly why the subject is so complex—it has the power to remind them of things that they have not read and heard, but that have been read and heard by others whom they have read and heard.

Thus the art, so private in execution, is also communal and filial. It can only exist as a common ground between the poet and other poets and other people, living and dead. Any poem worth the name is the product of a convocation. It exists, literally, by recalling past voices into presence. This has been no more memorably stated than in Spencer’s apostrophe to Chaucer in Book 4 of The Faeire Queene:

            through infusion sweet
     Of thine own spirit, which doth in me survive,
     I follow here the footing of thy feet.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written. As a new poem is made, not only with the art but within it, past voices are convoked—to be changed, little or much, by the addition of another voice.

—Wendell Berry, “The Responsibility of the Poet,” What Are People For: Essays by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1990)