Allusion can feel like something of a parlor game even in the best of times. In the 1940s, in a discussion of T. S. Eliot’s densely allusive poem “The Waste Land,” the formalist critics William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley questioned prevailing assumptions about the value of allusion-hunting. Eschewing the role of literary detective, they rejected the notion that we “do not know what a poet means unless we have traced him in his reading.” “Eliot’s allusions work,” they argued in “The Intentional Fallacy,” “when we know them — and to a great extent even when we do not know them, through their suggestive power. . . . It would not much matter if Eliot invented his sources,” as Walter Scott and Coleridge had done. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s warning that identifying an allusion does not amount to the same thing as understanding its significance has renewed urgency in the current age of allusion-­automation, for if the Web makes it that much easier for the allusion-hunter to bag his quarry, it does not necessarily tell him how to dress it.

Reacting against the insider trading characteristic of so much 20th- and 21st-century literature in the wake of modernism, some students refuse allusion altogether. Their impatience can extend beyond arguably esoteric literary references to the period details an author might invoke. Some of my students recently expressed frustration with Frank O’Hara’s elegy for Billie Holiday, “The Day Lady Died.” Who cares, they asked, about the brand of cigarettes O’Hara smoked, the literary journals he read, the train he caught or the jazz club he frequented? I think they resented O’Hara’s personal catalog of 1959 New York City, and they were largely unmoved by a classmate’s claim that the apparent triviality was precisely the point. We read O’Hara’s poem in an anthology that identified many of the references, but what use is a footnote that simply inventories the unfamiliar landmarks of an alien world? In trying to illuminate an allusion in class, I sometimes feel as if I’m opening one nesting doll after another until there’s nothing left at all.

Confronted by a vertiginous cascade of allusions, each one pointing to yet another unknown, retreating to the snail shell of the mind seems a whole lot more attractive: a poem responds to you, you don’t respond to it. In a letter she wrote the day she died, Elizabeth Bishop complained to the editor of an anthology that included some of her poems about the notes that had been appended: “If a poem catches a student’s interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary. . . . You can see what a nasty teacher I must be — but I do think students get lazier and lazier & expect to have everything done for them.” Bishop saw in her students’ resistance evidence of a bias against knowledge in favor of feeling: “They mostly seem to think that poetry — to read or to write — is a snap — one just has to feel — & not for very long, either.” She closed, “If you can get students to reading, you will have done a noble work.”

Sometimes I read that letter with students. They “get it” — absolutely — even when they have to ask, “Who’s Elizabeth Bishop?”