[nyctom]

Reading the various responses to two WTC poems--Alan's poem referencing "rough beasts" and Svein's poems referencing the legend of the Tower of Babel, coupled with seeing my friend's newest paintings drawing heavily on the work of Braque, Picasso and Cezanne, got me thinking about allusions, and about how we use--and can abuse them. So some questions I have been thinking about and thought I would ask both our Poet Lariats and Erato members at large. I will, for brevity's sake, confine them to literary allusions. Feel free to extrapolate wildly.

--What should a good literary allusion do?

--Should writers not challenge established literary allusions or attempt to recontextualize them? Or, similarly, under what context(s) would challenging/recontextualizing work well?

--At what point does an allusion become an homage? an outright ripoff?

--What are the least/most successful use(s) of literary allusions that come to mind?

Thank you all. I look forward to your response.

nyctom

[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited September 29, 2001).]

[Solan]

Great idea for a thread, Tom. For my own part, I do in particular hope to see answers to the second question.

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Svein Olav

.. another life

[Tim Murphy]

Folks, I'm up hunting from 4 AM on, and too pooped to Lariat. But let me briefly join in with my favorite literary allusion, which MacNeice gave us in Sunlight on the Garden:

Sunlight on the garden
hardens and grows cold.
We cannot cage the minute
within its nets of gold.
When all is told,
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
advances toward its end.
The earth compels; upon it
sonnets and birds descend,
and soon, my friend,
we shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying,
defying the iron bells
and every evil iron
siren and what it tells.
The earth compels:
We are dying, Egypt, dying

and not expecting pardon
hardened in heart anew
but grateful to have sat under
thunder and rain with you
and grateful too,
for sunlight on the garden.

This is one of those rare poems I never consciously memorized, but just typed (fairly accurately, I hope) from memory. The eight syllables from Antony and Cleopatra are the greatest literary allusion I have ever read. They are woven inextricably into the intricate fabric of the poem, they are as appropriate to the outbreak of WWII as to A&C's disaster at Actium. They are as timeless after September 11 as they were after the invasion of Poland.

[robert mezey]

That's a great poem Tim posted, and the allusion,
as he says, goes very deep. (The rhyming, esp.
the scheme of internal rhymes, is a wonder.)
Allusion is one of the most important resources
for poetry and has been for three thousand years
or so; and I'd guess that for American and European
poetry, the central source of allusion, far and
away, would be the Bible. One example that springs
to mind: the opening of that Zbigniew Herbert poem
I posted a couple of months back, "On My Father,"
with its thrilling and chilling allusion to Exodus---

his face in cloud, severe, above the waters of childhood
so rarely did he hold my warm head in his hands
given to be believed and not forgiving
as he rooted out the woods and straightened the paths
and carried the lantern high when we had entered the night

or consider Frost's little masterpiece, "The Most of It,"
which manages in 20 lines to allude powerfully to
Robinson Crusoe, Walden, Wordsworth's "boy of
Winander," and Job, just for openers.

And some poems depend almost entirely on allusion for
the whole point:

Arms and the man I sing, and with what joy,]
Who was last years all elbows and a boy.

[robert mezey]

An afterthought---I think one cannot depend on allusions
nearly as confidently as one could even 30 or 40 years ago.
The younger readers, including poets themselves, simply
will not recognize them. It doesn't matter how smart they
are; they have not had to learn much factual stuff or
read a great deal---most will not have read the Bible,
or enough classical literature to know much if anything
of Greek and Roman mythology. Hard to know what to do
about this; probably there's nothing that can be done.
I try to make my poems in such a way that they can be understood and enjoyed to a certain extent even by
readers who won't pick up on my allusions or other subtleties, but I have no idea whether I am successful
or not in this.

[Tim Murphy]

I try to do the same, Bob, and you succeed at it. I'm sure many of your allusions pass me by, ignorant of the Bible as I am. But your poems don't depend on the allusion. Like MacNeice, you weave them into the fabric of the poem, so the poem is comprehensible without an initiate's knowledge.

[Tim Love]

robert mezey - "I think one cannot depend on allusions nearly as confidently as one could even 30 or 40 years ago."
I'm sure that's true. In particular there's less agreement about which allusions the "intellegent" reader might be expected to pick-up. Should a knowledge of basic Science be assumed? Or of Literature? And as you point out, it's wrong to assume that readers know the Bible, and once you realise that, making allusions to the Bible becomes more of a cultural assertion than before.


robert mezey - "I try to make my poems in such a way that they can be understood and enjoyed to a certain extent even by readers who won't pick up the allusions"
But this is double-edged. If you give readers an easy option, they'll take it and may well assume that's the only option. Sometimes the dreaded quotemark may be a more reader-friendly option, or even footnotes -
http://homepages.tesco.net/~magdtp/p...surenotes.html
is one of the sadder examples of this.

A while ago I collected together some notes at
http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/allusions.html
and later put together some stats to see whether "if a
poem's cohesion is strong then it can survive allusions being missed (and indeed, they're more likely to be missed)." but I gave up.

[Solan]

I think a new question emerges out of this: Do you write for everybody, or for a target audience with the implied references?

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Svein Olav

.. another life

[Alder Ellis]

Solan >> I think a new question emerges out of this: Do you write for everybody, or for a target audience with the implied references? <<

I think you're right. But "whom do you write for?" can be a pretty elusive question, more a matter of tacit feeling than conscious purpose. It's one of the grounds or underlying motives of writing and so you're not usually conscious of it.

On the matter of allusions, what about topical or pop-cultural allusions? They have the advantage of being accessible to a wider contemporary audience, the disadvantage of being ephemeral & so inaccessible to that ultimate cultural audience, Posterity. (But if the work is strong and vital enough, it will drag its allusions with it into the future in the form of footnotes added by scholars.)

When you allude to a work within the greater cultural tradition, you are, for one thing, reaffirming the value of that work. You're not just addressing readers who know the work; you're also implying that readers should know the work. The sum of allusions in a given body of poetry imply an educational curriculum. In this sense, it's not so much a matter of targeting an existing audience, as specifying an adequate audience. The poet exerts a subtle pressure on his readers to get up to speed. This contributes to the maintenance of tradition.

[Caleb Murdock]

That poem by MacNeice may be the most beautiful thing I have ever read. Hoping to find more information on it, I searched for it on the web and was shocked to find it posted on site after site, not once accompanied by a copyright legend. I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person who is bothering to obey the copyright laws.

I wish that I could recognize more allusions, and use more of them, but being anti-Christian as I am, I can't bring myself to read that damn book (I don't mind reading ABOUT it, but that's as far as I will go). As for allusions to mythology, I learned all the myths in school but don't have the desire to revisit them. It takes a certain kind of mind to be endlessly curious about things which don't apply to one's life, and I just don't have that curiosity. Mezey and Murphy (and his 30,000 memorized lines) have it, but I can't be what I'm not.

However, I do get lucky once in a while. I just referenced Cain in one of my poems, and quite successfully, although the reference has such a classic quality, I'm concerned it has been done before.