Ignorant Knowledge

    The literary tourist in Birmingham will find a few lines from T.S. Eliot's 'Burnt Norton' carved on the rim of the fountain in Victoria Square. The lines are attributed to Eliot, but the source is not cited. I had to shuffle through Four Quartets to find them.

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

    One of the unfortunate traits inherited from teaching is that, as soon as you find out something new, you want to impart it. In other words, you are always disguising your ignorance as knowledge. (This does not usually apply to things you already know, such as that A. E. Housman came from nearby Worcestershire, and was not, in fact, ever, a Shropshire lad.)

   In literary exchanges, one of the conditions of the game tends to involve demonstrating what you know, comparing authors, citing examples, quoting phrases, etc. Just as interesting, I imagine, is how much you don't know. For example, in Stepping Stones, Heaney admitted to Dennis O' Driscoll that he had never got very far with Pound's Cantos. That might rate as influence, the fact that you haven't read such and such. Following that principle, my influences of the unread would include Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated, The Kalevala, and the novels of Gerald Griffin.

Another related topic here is the operation of memory. I count myself among those whose powers of recall are patchy. In literature and life we all know people with tremendous recall, such as Beckett. 

If you use a phrase which you read somewhere else  once, and then forgot until it reemerged in your writing, is that plagiarism or influence?