Allusion (3.14.18)

Allusion is one of those practices that makes poetry impossible to understand.  And snobbish.  And boring.  And useless.  

These are some of the arguments people have made to me about (against) poetry.  Usually, these folks are lit survey students (or were, when I taught survey courses eons ago), or people who've come to the reading and writing of poetry relatively late in life.  

Usually, the opinion comes out more like this: I don't read poetry; it's too hard to understand.  Once in a while somebody will say, Why don't they just say what they mean, without all the difficult stuff?

I suppose we have poets like Ezra Pound to thank for this.   

Fact is, I argued to my fellow W@1 writers, most of us who write poetry work in allusive material all the time.  Bennett works his Southern small town culture into almost every poem, much of which revolves around the kitchen.  Doug and Janet insert political references pretty regularly, most from current events, most in fact from the day's headlines.  June drops lines and images into her poems from her beloved New Jersey--place names, famous people.  Delaney loves to reference middle earth and Tolkein-flavored material as well as recognizably Goth content.  Curt includes references to the American songbook and theater (he's a stage devotee).  It goes on and it's fairly predictable.

Anyway, we set out at Wednesdays@One to challenge this view that allusion makes poetry too hard to read and write by writing consciously allusive poems ourselves.  I shared some definitions and examples with the group to help them get underway . . .

“. . . poetry [that] uses a powerful word, phrase or cultural reference that readers should understand in order to simply portray a complex concept.” www.wisegeek.com 

“Allusion is a figure of speech in which one refers covertly or indirectly to an object or circumstance from an external context.  It is left to the audience to make the connection; where the connection is directly and explicitly stated [the figure] is instead usually termed a reference.” Wikipedia

“Allusion in a work of literature is a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage.  In Thomas Nashe’s ‘Litany in Time of Plague,’

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye,

there is an explicit allusion to Helen of Troy.  Most allusions serve to enlarge upon or enhance a subject, but some are used in order ironically to undercut it by the discrepancy between the subject and the allusion.  In lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, describing a modern woman at her dressing table,

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble,

the ironic allusion, by the indirect mode of echoing Shakespeare’s words, is to Antony and Cleopatra (II . ii. 196 ff.):

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne

Burn’d on the water.

. . . a number of modern authors . . . often employ allusions that are highly specialized, or else are based on the author’s private reading and experience, in the knowledge that very few readers will recognize them without the help of scholarly annotation."

                                             ─M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 3^rd. Ed.

Abrams wrote the statement above as a kind of warning to the uninitiated (that would have been me, in my Freshman or Sophomore year of college and taking a first lit survey course--the teacher wisely included this helpful little book in his course text requirements) that the poems by Pound and Eliot and MacLeish and Auden and Allen Tate and H.D. and Marianne Moore and others that the professor (probably a graduate teaching assistant) was likely to make us read for the semester were going to sail right over our heads.

I argued to my fellow writers at W@1 that a poem's allusions do not have to be recognizable to everybody who reads the poem, nor immediately recognizable to anybody except the writer.  But a poem whose allusions are impossible to ferret out at all is really just obscure.  A poem whose references only an initiated few are meant to grasp is just a cult piece.  It's all right to make your reader work a little bit, even a lot, I urged my fellow writers.  But the more private a poem's allusions, the more likely a reader will be turned off.

Part of the reward of writing allusively is finding that balance of personal or specialized reference, that lends a poem a heightened or exotic or learned quality, and a more general cultural reference that a reader might recognize.  And part of the reward from achieving that balance is making your reader work just enough to "get" the allusion to feel rewarded herself for getting it, without alienating her or sending her off to somebody else's poem.