Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop have also been important influences in a different way. They reinforced my sense that poets should be slow to publish. It is not how much work a poet publishes, but how good that work is. I sometimes keep a poem back for ten years because a single line doesn't seem good enough. Or I will revise a poem fifty to a hundred times trying to get it exactly right.
Some people consider that behavior neurotic.
Larkin and Bishop, however, demonstrate that such a neurosis may not be altogether bad for a poet. Let me mention one more thing. By the time an active writer reaches his or her forties, one's personal style has pretty much set. I can still learn some small trick from another author or be reminded of an important general principle, but I no longer feel another writer's sensibility actively shaping my work as I did at nineteen or twenty. Rereading Frost last month, for example, I noted how often he loosens the meter slightly in his blank verse poems by substituting a three-syllabic foot, but he never puts three loose lines in a row.