https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/books/review/on-poetry-allusions-and-quotations.html Skip to contentSkip to site index Book Review Today's Paper What to Read * Skip to content What to Read * Find Your Next Book * Thrillers to Read Right Now * Winter Reads for Cold Nights * 10 Best Books of 2024 * 21st Century's Best Books * More * What to Read * Find Your Next Book * Thrillers to Read Right Now * Winter Reads for Cold Nights * 10 Best Books of 2024 * 21st Century's Best Books Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. Supported by SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On Poetry Masters of Allusion: The Art of Poetic Reference Poets have a way of incorporating other poets into their work. Our columnist approves. * Share full article * * This illustration shows offset squares of color stacked atop one another, with a string of the letters A, B, C and D running across them. Credit...Tom Etherington By Elisa Gabbert Elisa Gabbert's collections of poetry and essays include, most recently, "Normal Distance" and "Any Person Is the Only Self." Her On Poetry columns appear four times a year. Jan. 16, 2025 Here is some of the greatest, most practical advice I've heard on how to start reading poetry: "A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A." These lines come from Robert Frost's brief essay "The Prerequisites," on first encountering and not understanding -- not fully -- an Emerson poem. Some 50 years later, "the poem turned up again" and lo, it made more sense, "all but two lines of it." The working and thinking we do in a lifetime equips us, but even toward the end of life, we'll never be perfectly equipped, so we might as well get comfortable with partial understanding. The worldview this suggests is as freeing as believing in fate. It teaches trust and patience, since any poem has things to show us about the others. My A, B, C and D will be different from yours, so there's an element of chance in the sequence -- an opportunity for luck. Recently, reading "Some Lines Written in Clare Priory Yard," by G.C. Waldrep, I recognized a Heidegger reference: "I am,/in these moments, at the center of the world worlding." I might have passed right over it -- or registered only the vague sense of deja vu that is common while reading, as there are only so many words available for wording -- had I not just been reading Srikanth Reddy's "The Unsignificant," which includes, in a lecture on wonder, this quote from Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art": "The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand. ... The world worlds." In Frostian reading, serendipitous coincidence cannot be avoided. Charles Wright once wrote of Ezra Pound: "I remember how it began for me with 'The Cantos.' It was one word, dodici." This word, the Italian for 12, in the first of Pound's cantos he read, referred to a well-known restaurant in Verona, where Wright was living at the time. "If I can understand this one," he thought, "maybe the others can be tracked down too." These are necessary moments in a reader's education, where dumb luck makes us smarter -- it outsmarts erudition. According to the scholar Earl Miner, "The test for [allusion] is that it is a phenomenon some reader or readers may fail to observe." He does not say allusion itself is a test, but the misread floats over the sentence like an optical illusion. I remember, as a student, it felt like a test, when I was reading or more properly looking at modernist poetry and understanding nothing, because I didn't know what it would mean to understand a text like "The Waste Land" without constant recourse to the endnotes; they were annoyingly irresistible. Rather, Miner is making a distinction about intent. Allusion is, unlike intertextuality, deliberate, and, unlike plagiarism, meant to be recognized. It presumes "a community of knowledge," a phrase I like for its fellow feeling. I like to think that people who have read the same poems -- my A may be your B -- are friends of a kind, across any distance, before and after death. I'm interested in how we decide what is and isn't deliberate in a work of art -- even when the work is our own. Miner writes that "intertextuality is involuntary" -- perhaps, like a twitch. An intentional reference might and possibly must contain additional layers of reference, unknown to us, forgotten or not yet discovered. I can't think of a better example than a meme I saw many years ago, an image of a hissing cat with a text overlay reading I MYSELF AM HELL. The joke was, it's a Lowell-cat. That's surely Robert Lowell's most recognizable line (from "Skunk Hour"), but he added only the "I." The rest is straight from "Paradise Lost." We are having trouble retrieving the article content. 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