ABSTRACT
Poetic allusions - this is part of their power both to charm and to frustrate - cannot be proved or disproved. At first this elusiveness seems disastrous to the critic. U pon reflection, however, the problem seems less threatening: little that readers value in poetry responds reliably to the arid analysis of axiom and corollary, or even to the more pragm atic pins and tools of dissection that serve so well to examine the earthworm or affix the butterfly to the board once it can no longer fly. M etaphor, for example, illuminates its object with a light in which, but for the poet’s rearrangem ent of our world, we would not have thought to place the familiar object. And once the new perception occurs, who will say how far the poet intended it to extend, where the boundaries are that should limit the insight the unexpected comparison provides?Yet even m etaphor has an anatomy; confronted with a new juxtaposition of this and that, one need not be simply reduced to ineffable aesthetic delight. In fact, the basic workings of m etaphor can be explained fairly simply and with fair precision. And this is particularly fortunate, for they are very like the elements which operate in poetic allusion. Thus this introduction will make its initial explanation of poetic allusion in terms of the mechanics of m etaphor - mechanics perhaps more familiar to the reader.Though the ultim ate subject of this book is Greek tragedy, this introduction takes its examples from Greek lyric. Such a course has several advantages. Lyric allusions tend to be simpler than tragic ones. Moreover, having been treated more thoroughly by other scholars in recent years, they provide immediate access to a range of recent opinion and method. Finally - and this ultimately makes it almost necessary to begin from lyric - during the classical age young Athenians were taught lyric poetry as part of their
INTRODUCTION education, adults entertained themselves with it at d inner parties, and the tragedians, whose works are the basis for this book, had lyric poetry as part of their traditional and professional heritage. Playwrights may have learned the art of allusion from their predecessors working in smaller forms. M ay, perhaps, possibly . . .W hat of certainty? To say that poetic allusions cannot be proved or disproved is to claim at once too much and too little. The reference to earlier poetry is beyond doubt in the following verses of an elegiac poet (it may have been Simonides):
ev 6e t o xaXXioxov Xiog eeurev avf|p-“our] Jisp cJ>tjXX.o)v yevefi, xoiri 6e xai avdpcov”* The m an from Chios said one thing that is best:Such as are the leaves’ generations, so also are m en’s.
