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. Upon 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 pragmatic 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. Metaphor, for example, illuminates its object with a light in which, but for the poet’s rearrangement 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?
