Variations on a Theme by Houseman

When I was twenty or twenty-one, I was very much under the influence of my college friends who were serious musicians, despite the fact that I was devoid of musical talent myself. When I grasped the idea that serious composers of music often took musical themes from other composers and played with them in their compositions, it occurred to me that I could do the same with poetry. And so it was that in my innocence and vanity, I took ideas and even phrases from the writers who were influencing...