allusive to some

[Robert Lowell's] poems are not easy reading for the average American, who knows no poetry, no history, no theology, and no Latin roots.

—Helen Vendler, The New Republic, 28 July 2003

footnotes to the world

There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.

—George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952), Realms of Being (Columbia U. Press, 1940)

physical object

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are merely symbols—spring to life and we have the resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Borges’ Norton Lectures at Harvard, HUP, 2000)