By Olivia Sandhu
“Upping the ante” with classical allusion
A E Stallings, Lecture, 2024
Poems can work like “ingeniously wrought music boxes”; they can “hiss like fat” and also “play for mortal stakes”. This is the kind of language that encapsulates A E Stallings’ own literary ethos. She is a poet known for concrete and succinct strength of form and sound — “A patient art, knapped from a core of flint / Most broken, few as coins new from the mint” (Arrowhead Hunting) — self-consciously rooted in her background in Classics and translation (the ancients “taught me to sound modern”).
A recent Oxford Student interview describes Stallings as taking a “uniquely nitty-gritty, nuts-and bolts approach” to language, which was embodied in her fourth lecture as the 47th Oxford Professor of Poetry: “Upping the ante: how word choice, quotation and allusion in poems raise the stakes”. Here, Stallings engaged with the materiality of poems (they can be “brocaded”, “jewelled”, “dense in textures allusively, sonically”) while suggesting at times that poems are things which can be ‘sprung’, wound up for maximum effect in a reader, yet also potentially fail in their mechanisms. She considered how poets might ‘heighten the stakes’ in their work through a particular strategy of classical ‘name-dropping’ — something not quite summed up by ‘allusion’ or ‘quotation’.
Stallings began by considering how a single word or name, classically charged, can work in a poem to “change everything that comes before and after it”. Hence, a single “achilles” in John Berryman’s Dream Song 14 could become, through Stallings’ lens, the “hinge” (or “heel”) upon which the deeper reading of the poem depended. We saw a figure of the withdrawn Homeric hero “sulkily strumming his lyre beside the sea” imposed on the previously blank speaker and undefined ennui. His mother from the 1st stanza becomes, in retrospect, a Thetis-like figure: consoling, gently reproaching. ‘Achilles’ shifts and elevates, too, the last stanza of “tranquil hills, & gin” to a new epic register.
Examples of an ‘elliptical’ kind of classical allusion are not uncommon in contemporary poetry or writing, or among Stallings’ own works (e.g. Half of an Epic Simile Not Found in Hesiod). Scanning through a Poetry Review or Granta can feel, for any kind of Classicist, like a sort of “Easter egg” hunt, to borrow Stalling’s phrasing. The eye latches onto a “Medusa” half-way down the page; or an “Icarus” in an airport (Nick Makoha, Poetry Review Summer 2024). Classical titles and ‘name-drops’ can seem to work as natural lifting-off points (becoming again the “hinge” or “heel” for meaning), furthered by the disjunctions and gaps they create. These are words which demand interpretation — drawn from the ‘weighty’ Western canon (Classical or ‘classic’ in a lower-case sense), they bring their own baggage to a poem, whether literary or cultural. Wherever an “achilles” or a “rosalind” appear in a poem, we rush to try and work out what they are doing there, and the poet can exploit this impulse. In this vein, Stallings raised Philip Larkin’s famous “myth-kitty” invective:
“As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.”
In particular, Stallings underlined this idea of “letting you see they know the right people” (suggesting that allusion/reference could feature as a kind of comforting nudge-nudge wink-wink for readers of a certain literary background). She was obviously energised by Larkin’s “myth-kitty” coinage, since it lent itself so well to her lecture’s theme — his phrase borrowed the ‘kitty’ of a card game, the hand when all is at stake. An anxiety of needing to ‘earn’ classical allusion, however, persisted throughout the talk – these references can further become the hinge upon which a poem ‘succeeds’ or ‘fails’.
Stallings’ defence of classical allusion focuses on the greater poetic effects or dimensions that it can open up in a poem ‘strong enough’ to support it. Nevertheless, the need to defend this classical magpieing, or the discomfort around “casual allusions”, as Larkin calls them, is perhaps in itself a little tired. I was left wondering whether use of classical name-dropping in the ‘cheapest’, most casual way possible, e.g. completely littering poems without apparent need for recognition, might not also be an interesting way of divesting these words of weight, to attempt to cheat the reader further by providing no “hinge” or cipher for meaning. We could ask what ‘messy’, ‘empty’ or completely chaotic kinds of classical engagement would look like, and whether the classical is even still as ‘weighty’ as we might think. These references perhaps now carry ‘dead’ associations (can an Iliad allusion still evoke the domain of public-school boys?) — maybe they are now free for the taking, no strings attached.
Stallings, while not endorsing this, certainly shows an interest in setting ‘classics’ side-by-side with the tangible, the trivial, and the ‘unacademic’, alongside demonstrating the greater poetic effects that the ‘classical’ can offer. Previously, in reviewing the scholarship-poetry of Anne Carson, she has emphasised Carson’s “madcap” way of wearing her learning “as lightly as a helium balloon on the wrist”. The nimble, practical tone of her own analysis seems to further defend against literary smugness.
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As the lecture moved from “hinges” to “keyholes”, Stallings looked at what happens when:
“…Something that seems very big and extraneous to the poem suddenly appears and provides a sort of keyhole or door or something kind of blows the poem open.”
She repeatedly demonstrated how ‘name-dropping’ and allusion can elevate a poem to an entirely different register, open up parallel meta-poetic or unworldly domains, or simply ‘stranger’ it, especially again through gaps and disjunctions. We saw, for example, “Babylonian faces” transforming Robert Francis’ monosyllabic Sheep poem from nursery rhyme simplicity to the realm of “deep history”.
Meanwhile, Michael Donaghy’s The Bacchae featured a film noir Pentheus, figured as a “thin-skinned” Slim (who “thinks he knows a thing or two” and wants to cheat at card-games), coming up against the “girls” whose “secret groove’s their sacred grove”. It is in the final lines that Stallings proposed the poet “goes all in”:
“…these are initiated dames
the how they move is the what they are”.
Lifted by Stallings’ reading from its black-and-white mobster slang, the word “dame” itself, and her stressed succinct alignment of groove/grove, seemed to sit almost naturally among the shady rites of maenads. The disjunction works to create a new space with its own poetic coherence – if not an entirely fixed one. For example, there remains the question of priority: is it the classical that conditions film noir here, or is film noir (un)colouring the classical?
In her final close reading, Stallings upped the ante through an analysis of A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford by Derek Mahon. The idea of keyholes and extraneous spaces was both spotlighted and neatly inverted by this poem, in which “A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole” in a decades-locked up shed, peering out at a greater, freer world through their one window:
“This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?”
We are aware from the beginning these are not merely mushrooms (“magi, moonmen, / Powdery prisoners of the old regime”); an epigraph from George Seferis widens the poem’s scope with its connotations of resistance and protest. This is confirmed in what could (tentatively) be name-dropping in the 3rd stanza: “Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!”. As Stallings underlined, this is a kind of referencing that carries bigger ‘risks’ for the poem/poet: the “namechecking” of the Holocaust in the midst of a poem on anthropomorphic, jostling fungi, risks the rest of the poem seeming “disproportionate”, or potentially frivolous — a cynical appropriation on the poet’s part. The poem must be able to prop it up.
It is in being placed side-by-side with Pompeii, Stallings argued, that this joint-reference expands the poetic space to something more than poetry (speaking “not of troubles but of trouble”). Such a poem ups the ante by “playing for mortal stakes — but the risk pays off in spades”. Exactly how this worked in Stallings’ analysis, I was left slightly unsure. There was perhaps something here again about the directionality of reference/allusion — the poem is not imposing mushroom imagery on Treblinka and Pompeii, nor exactly imposing the real-life suffering literally on the other. Rather, we might say a third space is opened up in the reader’s mind. The trouble and suffering of the poem’s speakers becomes part of a greater space, but it is a space neither fully abstracted nor localised.
Stallings further nudged us towards asking what or who is locked in/out from poetic spaces, and the poetry canon – what is it that becomes “enshrined” by the public in poetry? When reading the final stanza of the poem, her voice became noticeably strained. She aimed to show how a poem seemingly about mushrooms could come to speak for the “refugees in the Mediterranean… for those buried under the rubble of Gaza”, and for those whose lives are irrevocably impacted by climate change, among others. Clearly, she wished to share in Mahon’s heightening of the stakes of poetry itself, or to invite us “at least not to close the door again”.
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Larkin’s criticism still reflects a more general truth — heavy name-dropping could equally be seen (perhaps in the hands of a weaker poet) as a ‘cheap’ or lazy strategy to try and bolster a poem’s interest or authority. It can create a harsher criteria against which the work may ‘pass or fail’ (hence how the stakes may be heightened).
Yet perhaps the stakes and baggage of classical namedropping can still be borne lightly. Stallings’ insistence on form and sonality in her own poetry (the “nitty-gritty” toolbox at the poet’s disposal) is part of her remedy for avoiding excessive ornamentality. Notably, both classical reference and poetic technique (rhyme, metre) can create convenient vessels for poets by virtue of the challenge they entail (ie. opportunities for resistance, or exploiting gaps). For Stallings, it is poetic control and dexterity that can earn the pay-off of everything that comes ‘rushing in’ for the reader, without overwhelming the rest of the poem – the careful ‘winding up’ of a poem transforms it “from a perfect poem to a great one”.
This works alongside her preference for clear-cut, unflowery language (in Daedal, the famous labyrinth becomes “the path of bats”…“the shaken Etch A Sketch”). So too, Stallings’ lecture analysis jumped nimbly from Lucretius to the mud-season in Vermont, from the ‘academic’ to the personal and prosaic. In her inaugural lecture last year, she posited a concept of “Bat Poetics”, dealing with unobvious connection-making in poetry in terms of “echolocations”. This novelty (not a trivial kind) is what helps ensure poetry isn’t entirely drained of life for students and readers, who may be sick of colourless theory. In a self-referential way, while maintaining that poetry can have real risks and real stakes, Stallings made sure to underline the classical etymology of allusion (Latin alludere, to play).
OLIVIA SANDHU is reading for a Master’s in Classics, living between Oxford and Nottingham.
Art by Olivia Endacott
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