I think something interesting happens when allusiveness overruns the
ability of any reader, even the most diligent/tolerant, to pick up all
the threads or fashion a consistent whole out of them - or when it
disappears off down mouseholes so far from the sphere of public
letters that one would have to be a particularly obsessive kind of
stalker-biographer to find them out.
What you get then is a kind of sensuous enigma, something with an
immediately "accessible" facade that is at the same time porous and
honeycombed: not "well-grounded" or referentially secure but
nevertheless having a structure, an independent integrity of its own.
But one has to dispel somehow the anxiety that the "references" in the
poem really are resolvable, if only the reader were clever enough (or
sufficiently in the know), and the resentment that tends to go along
with that anxiety. It's only "wilful obscurity" if it's obscurity
itself that's being willed, rather than the play of light among the
fragments.
Dominic
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