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By Root 888 0

as what used to be called survey courses in English literature, the epic and the novel, and drama from the Greeks to the present day. If we were to try to adapt the terms of Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” to the realm of literary study, rather than of literary production, I would be pretty clearly on the side of the fox rather than the hedgehog.7 Or, to put it another way, my interests are transhistorical, eclectic, thematic, and theoretical. I am less interested in thick description and period-based work, more intrigued by following out an idea, an intuition, a hunch, or a series of associations wherever they lead me. But I am deeply committed to research, to evidence, to documentation, to the acknowledgment of prior scholars’ work, and to other things that belong to the apparatus of scholarship.

So for me, the dichotomy between so-called specialists and so-called generalists is a false divide. Since I believe, along with many of the critics I have cited in these pages, that the colloquy is always being held across the centuries between and among writers, whether of fiction, poetry, drama, or any other genre, to specialize will mean to know the intellectual surround (as well as the historical background) of any given author’s work, its precursors and successors, its effects and affects. What I want to emphasize here, though, is the distinct kind of pleasure that comes from connecting one literary work or phrase or character or passage with another—the experience that is sometimes called getting, or catching, or recognizing a literary allusion.

The Fate of an Allusion

The title of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is a reference to the theme song of Disney’s Three Little Pigs (1933), but it would have no resonance if the name Virginia Woolf didn’t already carry some important connotative power (feminist writer; major twentieth-century novelist; innovative stylist; Bloomsbury icon). Albee apparently said that when he saw the phrase scrawled on a mirror, he thought of it as “a rather typical, university intellectual joke.”8 It’s hard to know whether such a joke would today be the typical product of college wit. Or take a slightly different kind of example, T. S. Eliot’s play Sweeney Agonistes, which offers a wry reference to John Milton’s verse tragedy Samson Agonistes (1671). The titles of both Sweeney Agonistes and Gary Wills’s biography Nixon Agonistes (1969) assume at least a fleeting familiarity with Milton’s poem, or at least with its title. As with Albee’s Virginia Woolf, the wit lies in the apparent disjunction between the original and the subsequent allusion.

But the practice of allusion seems to have moved from the realm of classic literature to popular culture and politics. The old-style literary allusion required that the reader or hearer identify the reference. Thus, the American poet Amy Lowell could, in 1912, title a poem “Fresh Woods and Pastures New” and assume that her readers would understand the allusion to the last line of Milton’s “Lycidas.” An exhibition of Dutch seventeenth-century landscape drawings with that title toured in 2000, having originated in a university art gallery. Slate used the same phrase appositely as the title of a posted item on the move of a professor from one law school to another; the professor, it turned out, was writing a book on law and Shakespeare, so he was twice embarking on a new venture, field, and vocation.9 But these audiences of readers are comparatively cognoscenti. How many readers would catch a witty reference to “fresh woods and pastures new” today?

Let’s take another example, perhaps a more familiar one to modern readers, the phrase “miles to go before I sleep” from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” (The alert reader of this book will see that I got from Milton’s woods to Frost’s woods by a process of association, though it is more conventional to associate Frost’s entry into the woods with that of Dante in his Inferno.) In any case, “miles to go before I sleep” has had a lively itinerary, having