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  • First Acquaintance & "Quaint Allusion"
  • Susan J. Wolfson

I. Alluding to Allusion

The first thing that Michael Drayton, in the persona of "Author," speaks of in the headnote to Poly-Olbion, "Of The Illustrations" (1612), is the resource of allusion, "What the Verse oft, with allusion, as supposing a full knowing Reader, lets slip." In a sharp commentary on this sentence, Joseph Pucci notes the agency of the verse and the privileging of "the reader in the process of unraveling allusive meaning," more particularly a "full knowing Reader," who "spies the allusion and constructs a meaning for it." It's a slippery process, Pucci notes, because "lets slip" is both a textual revelation and a reader's grasp. I admire this reading of Drayton's syntax, but what interests me just as much is what Pucci elides: the full knowing Author who has constructed this syntax and the transaction that Pucci so nicely glosses. That was 1998, or even earlier in the preliminary PhD thesis he was completing in the mid 1980s.1 Allusion is not now as it hath been of yore.

Formerly culled from a library of one's own and relayed for recognition, the play of allusion used to resonate in the knowing transactions. No more. Phrase, trope and turn, now and in time to be, whenever the screen is on, are no sooner sensed than searched, Googled, Ecco'd, and LION'd. All is changed, changed utterly; the World Wide Web is born. "No book, however rare or obscure, will actually be hard to find," Adam Kirsch remarks of the search-enginuity; "no quotation, however recondite, will be difficult to recognize." And if "every reader can tune in, allusion is no longer a privileged channel of communication."2 Such loss of privilege strikes Kirsch elegiacally, but I confess my happy tuning. The old channels were not necessarily restricted to privilege, moreover, if by this you mean elite subscription. Literacy and memory issued a general passport. Even so, a passport is just a pass to enter; and a search engine, at best, a golden retriever in the field of research. Golden, yes: quick to turn up a phrase. But it stops short of turning interpretive.

And this is allusion's vital turn: one imagination playing toward (ad ludere) another, as a reader, to a reader, for fresh relations. For this [End Page 261] call (as Drayton's cagily signed Author-manager of the allusive slips of verse slyly asserts), both author and reader have to be ready to catch, and among the readiest as both was William Hazlitt. He had libraries, at his hand, in his head; he loved reading, enjoyed a retentive and playful imagination, wrote with a tensile, allusive intelligence. A "ready knowledge" of both original text and context is what Alexander Pope relies on for the easy allusiveness in The Rape of the Lock, Earl Wasserman proposes; I shall be finding Hazlitt more allied with this readiness than with James Chandler's view of Romantic allusiveness as less a deliberate art than an associative reflex of composition, its conscious intention elusive.3 The very fabric of Hazlitt's luminously touching essay My first Acquaintance with Poets involves "acquaintance" with what its author-persona W. H. calls "quaint allusion."4 The syllable-echo is no accident. From Anglo-Norman to Old French, acquaintance and quaint tap a Latin root in knowing: ad cognitum (toward knowing), cognitus (known)—both knowing allusion's deep field. Wistfully nostalgic, wittily new-angled: quaint allusion appeals to Hazlitt as an art routed across time. It is telling that Dr. Johnson's Dictionary cites Jonathan Swift's phrase "quaint modernisms" in the entry "Modernism."5

When My first Acquaintance was published, in 1823, quaint had this double sense: a modern recognition of a style out of style. In Barry Cornwall's A Sicilian Story, for instance, we are advised that "for the moral," we may "trace it in the quaint and antique text" (XXXVIII). Anna Barbauld refuses the trope in "Washing Day" (1797), this hard labor unrelieved by any "quaint device of mirth" (15).6 William Wordsworth has a wry regard of the "Nutting" boy (Lyrical Ballads, 1800), "trick'd out" in...

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