Connotations Vol. 26 (2016/2017) The Equanimity of Influence: Milton and Wordsworth * STEPHEN M. FALLON Northrop Frye argued that “[l]iterature may have life, reality, experi- ence, nature, imaginative truth, social conditions, […] for its content; but literature […] is not made out of these things. Poetry can only be made out of other poems” (Frye 97). If, with some allowance for exaggeration, this is the case, it is especially true of epic, the most intensively self-reflexive genre. At least from the time that Vergil contained the Odyssey and Iliad in the two halves of his Aeneid, epic poets have competed with predecessors whom they seek to contain and surpass. 1 In this essay I will address how Wordsworth makes his poetry out of Milton’s poetry, and particularly his Prelude out of Paradise Lost, continuing a line of argument that I introduced in an essay on Wordsworth’s “Nutting.” I will suggest that for Words- worth, reading Milton’s poetry is a profoundly enabling condition for writing his own. My title of course gestures towards Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. By recasting the relation of Wordsworth to Milton, with I hope more accuracy than elegance, as one of “equanimity of infl u- ence,” I mean to suggest that in The Prelude, Wordsworth is in a dia- logue with Milton’s Paradise Lost that is both conscious and notably free of anxiety. Wordsworth has here, that is to say, left behind much of the anxiety that marks the Prospectus to the 1814 edition The Re- cluse, a poem dating from the turn of the nineteenth century. There *For debates inspired by this article, please check the Connotations website at <http://www.connotations.de/debate/between-shakespeare-milton-and- wordsworth/>.