Among the medieval artifacts in the British Museum is an example of what’s called an acoustic pot. These earthenware vessels were placed in cavities in the chapel walls where monks and nuns would sing; they made the pitch more resonant. Lately, I’ve been thinking that poets do much the same thing when they quote or imbed allusions to other poems in their own art. When poets resonate together, especially across the divide between the living and the dead, it lends an eerie power to the work.
- Ange Mlinko, from her essay on The Waste Land over at Poets.org. You can read the whole thing here.
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