The last chapter was concerned with righting an imbalance in the common perception of the relationships between poets, texts and readers. Any corrective measure, however, always runs the risk of excess so that we exchange a prejudice for a dogma, even one as attractive and provocative as Maurice Blanchot's dictum that a book that hasn't been read is a book that hasn't been written. To compare the poetic text to a sleeping princess that awaits the reader's kiss to bring it to life, however, is to disregard its inherent vitality, even if it is conceded that it depends upon the reader for its completion. Indeed modern criticism focuses as much on the text as on the reader in its reaction to the cult of the author so prevalent in the wake of Romanticism, most famously enunciated in Roland Barthes's article entitled ‘The death of the author’. The subject of dispute has not been whether the text was important, but how it was important. To summarize the theories and movements engaged in this issue would be quite beyond the scope of this study. In a book dedicated to a survey of the poetry of many centuries, however, it is fruitful to explore at least some of the ways in which texts relate to each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, often ahead of his time, observed that every book is a quotation, an idea echoed by Harold Bloom when he asserts that ‘the meaning of a poem can only be another poem’.