My influences are many and encompass all of the written arts. Included are those who are considered philosophers, dramatists, social or spiritual thinkers, critics, or essayists. I will try to do this with some semblence of chronological and historical order.
The writers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages who have influenced me: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, Homer, Hesiod, Horace, Sappho, Ovid, Lucan, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Aesop, Diogenes Laertes, Epicurus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Zeno, Plutarch, Livy, Seneca, St. Augustine, Lao-Tzu, Sun-Tzu, Avicenna, Li Po, Basho, Omar Khayyam, and al-Ghazali.
The writers of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic periods who have influenced me: Erasmus, More, Dante, Machiavelli, Malory, Ariosto, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Decartes, Dryden, Racine, Hafiz, Shakespeare, Herbert, Moliere, S. Johnson, la Fontaine, Ronsard, Pope, Goldsmith, Hobbes, Blake, Fuller, Austen, Scott, both Shelleys, both Brontes, Fichte, Cooper, Byron, Balzac, Coleridge, Keats, Dumas, Wordsworth, Hawthorne, Carlyle, Voltaire, Stendhal, Locke, Goethe, Bentham, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Puskin, Poe, Kierkegaard, and Clausewitz.
(I'm aware of the historical overlap between some names of these two sections)
Writers of modern eras who have influenced me: Twain, Mill, Thoreau, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Melville, Longfellow, Emerson, Bryant, Huxley, Sandburg, Apollinaire, Proust, Sinclair, Stoker, Tolstoy, Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Wilde, Zola, Bakunin, Huysmans, Hugo, Nietzsche, Kipling, Kafka, Bulgakov, Dickens, Gilbran, Tennyson, Tagore, Joyce, de Touqueville, Marx, James, London, Pound, Russell, de Mauppassant, Chekhov, Shaw, Faulkner, Browning, Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Golding, Remarque, Frost, Kerouac, Bukowski, Tolkien, Valery, Ginsberg, Weil, Plath, Greene, Thompson, Hemmingway, Foucault, Solzhenyitsyn, Satre, Freud, Camus, and Jung.
A multitude of other individuals, including politicians, heads of state, military commanders, religious figures, scientists and explorers, reformers, outlaws and revolutionaries, musicians, painters, and journalists have influenced my writing and my worldviews but are too numerous to list here.
I was born a Gemini in Michigan in 1980. I've been writing poetry for more than a decade, and have been writing at a semi-professional level for about 3 years. I am fascinated with poetics of every theme, theory, species, and style. Metric and prose, terse and lengthy, the brooding and the absurd, the subtle and the explicit, all possess an artistic and expressive value to me. My work is an attempt at bringing these creative forces together to offer a bizarrely aesthetic experience for the reader, where thought and emotion intersect in the manifestion of the actualized subconscious.
In the paradise of the San Diego sun, where I've resided for nearly 5 years and have since been enthralled by the place, I am currently working on my second book of poetry and continuing my exploration of the written arts.
If anything is possible, if complete freedom exists in the universe, and nothing is impossible at the same time, what is the purpose of science? Science seeks to limit the possible, prove the impossible, and establish order to the universe. How then can limitless possibility, total freedom, exist within an ordered, scientific system? Hmmmm...
Wayne Paul
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