There are cases of profound formal influence. And more, we can often unearth in the work of one writer undeniably fragments of the precise language of another, the words in their order, the identical similes. Such bald resort to another man's diction, however, is a phenomenon of poets. I can think of no serious novelist who has made such resort. The reason is simple enough.
Poets are primarily concerned with language.
It is both their subject and object. But despite the labors of Flaubert, Henry James and James Joyce, the novelist has not been primarily obsessed with language. Among poets, only the epic poet and occasionally the verse dramatist are concerned with sweeps of time. Thus the poet's reliance on language, his means of achieving intensity. But excellence of the novel, it would be more accurate to say, is its stamina, an excellence of long-term understanding exerted over the lives of inconsistent human beings who move without rest through modifying time, eroding space.