This contribution proposes a gendered reconfiguration of the concept of influence through critical male discourse from 1895 to 1914, emphasising its reactive nature, in that it can, to an extent, be seen as a response to the significant emergence of women in poetry. The article underlines the importance of this modulation of the concept in terms of the forging and ideological reorientation of key oppositional doublets during this literary period: atavism and rootedness, regeneration and degeneration.