The Greatest Influences is a dramatic poetic form intended to amuse the audience concerning immortality, originating in The Lantern of Nails. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single quintain. Use of consonance and simile is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines use the same placement of allusions. Every line of the poem has an initial caesura. The first line has nine syllables. The second line has seven syllables. The third line has twelve syllables. The fourth line has three syllables. The fifth line has ten syllables.