Anthony Hecht

COMMENTS 385 ANTHONY HECHT I suppose it could be argued that all poetry (and much painting and music) is 'allusive,' if only because we only learn to write poetry from having read other poems, and to that degree are always in their debt, whether we like it, or admit it, or not. Moreover, 'allusions' may take the form of hostility and repudiation. I've just been treating the poems of William Carlos Williams in one of my classes, and it seems to me that such a poem as 'Spring and All' ('By the road to the contagious hospital') intends to be a vigorous repudiation of the standard pastoral encomium to spring, as it might be represented by, for example, 'Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king,' by Thomas Nashe, or by whole volumes of such conventions. In fact, all the internecine battles in poetry between conservatives and revolutionaries involve just such allusions on both sides. When Wordsworth writes, 'Spade! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands ...,' he believes he is striking a blow for poetic liberty, farm implements being regarded by 'established poetic conventions' as beneath the proper level of poetic diction; but any sense of the meaning and feeling of that line requires that we be conscious of the contending forces at work. All kinds of readers' expectations may be aroused simply by the use of specific 'forms,' and in this way formal patterning may itself serve allusive functions. ...