What intertextuality means in poetry
Intertextuality is the idea that texts are connected to other texts. A poem may quote another work, allude to it, retell it, answer it or imitate its style. Even when a poet does not mean to, the poem is shaped by the writing the poet has read.
The term is usually credited to the critic Julia Kristeva, who introduced it in the 1960s. Since then writers on the subject have noted that some intertextuality is deliberate and obvious, such as a quotation or a parody, while some is much less visible. In practice, “intertextual poetry” means a poem whose meaning depends partly on another text, so that knowing the other text adds something.
Main ways poems connect to other texts
Quotation and epigraph
A poet may quote directly, either inside the poem or as an epigraph before it. The reader is expected to bring the quoted source to mind. The quotation can lend authority, create irony, or set up a contrast between old and new.
Allusion
An allusion is a brief reference that does not stop to explain itself, such as a name, a phrase or a situation from an earlier work. It trusts the reader to recognise it.
Retelling and revision
Some poems take a familiar story, myth or poem and retell it from a different position, often giving a voice to someone silent in the original.
Parody, pastiche and mock-epic
Parody imitates a work in order to mock it or to be funny. Pastiche imitates a style, often with affection or as an exercise. A mock-epic uses the grand manner of epic poetry for a trivial subject.
Borrowed forms: the golden shovel
The golden shovel is a poetic form created by the poet Terrance Hayes. The poet takes a line from an existing poem and uses each word of that line, in order, as the last word of a line in the new poem. Hayes’s original took its words from a line of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool”. The form makes the connection to the source part of the poem’s structure.
Intertextuality poem examples
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The opening of The Waste Land (1922) is:
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,
Many readers hear in this an answer to the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where April is a welcome season of renewal. Eliot turns the idea around: spring is painful rather than comforting. (For what the lilac itself can stand for, see lilac symbolism in literature.) The poem goes on to weave in quotations and allusions from many languages and traditions, and it ends with the Sanskrit word “Shantih” repeated three times.
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“Prufrock” opens with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno. Later the speaker compares himself with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and then denies the comparison:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
The poem uses the allusion to show what the speaker is not: he is a hesitant, minor figure rather than a tragic hero.
Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Owen’s First World War poem ends by quoting a line of the Latin poet Horace:
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
The Latin phrase, usually translated as saying that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country, is the target of the poem. The quotation is deliberately set against the horrors the poem has just described, which turns an old patriotic saying into a bitter irony.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
Tennyson takes the hero of Homer’s epic and imagines him as an old man restless at home. The poem’s final line, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, has become a well-known motto. The poem depends on the reader knowing the Homeric background, but also reworks it, because the hero here is shaped by later literary tradition as well as Homer.
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Pope’s poem is a mock-epic. It applies the machinery of classical epic, including battles, supernatural beings and heroic language, to a quarrel over a stolen lock of hair. The humour comes from the gap between the grand form and the small subject.
Carol Ann Duffy, The World’s Wife
Duffy’s 1999 collection retells myths and stories from the viewpoint of women connected to famous men, as in “Mrs Midas”. These are retellings: the reader knows the original story and hears what it left out.
Derek Walcott, Omeros
Walcott’s long poem (1990) is set in the Caribbean and draws on Homer, not by copying the Iliad and Odyssey but by echoing their characters and structure in a new setting. It is often named as a major example of a modern poem in dialogue with epic tradition.
Kenneth Koch, “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams”
Koch’s poem is a parody of Williams’s brief poem “This Is Just to Say”, which apologises for eating someone’s plums. Koch keeps the apologetic pattern but substitutes a destructive act, so the humour depends on knowing the original.
Types of intertextuality
There is no single agreed list of three types. Different writers divide the idea in different ways, so it helps to know a few common approaches.
- Explicit versus implicit. Some works signal their connections openly (quotations, parodies, imitations) while in others the relation is not foregrounded.
- Iterability and presupposition. The writer James Porter distinguished these two. Iterability covers the repeating of fragments, from quotations to unannounced echoes and clichés. Presupposition covers the assumptions a text makes about its reader and context.
- Everyday categories. In classroom use, people often sort examples into quotation, allusion and parody or pastiche, with retelling as a fourth.
If a question asks for “three types”, check which framework your course or textbook uses, and follow that one.
Pastiche in intertextuality
Pastiche is a work that imitates the style, form or manner of another writer or period. Unlike parody, it does not need to mock its source, and it can be a tribute, a stylistic exercise, or a collage of borrowed manners. A modern poem that imitates the diction of the Elizabethan sonnet in a straight-faced way would be pastiche. If it exaggerated that diction for comic effect, it would be parody. The line between the two can blur, so critics often say that the difference lies in intent and tone.
Literary texts poems can draw on
Poems do not borrow only from other poems. Common sources include:
- earlier poems and sonnets
- epics and myths
- plays, such as Shakespeare’s
- the Bible and other religious texts
- novels and short stories
- speeches, songs and nursery rhymes
How to spot and write about intertextuality
- Look for odd phrasing. A line that sounds borrowed, or a sudden shift into another language, often signals a source.
- Read epigraphs and titles. They are frequent hints.
- Find the source text. Once you have it, compare the two passages.
- Ask what changes. Is the old text honoured, mocked, corrected or given a new voice?
- Link it to the poem’s meaning. Avoid simply naming the source. Say what the connection adds. This is the same move that earns marks in the poetry question described in AP Literature essay examples.
Related reading
Speakers in intertextual poems are often borrowed characters, and our point of view poem examples explain how to tell who is speaking. For a method of setting a poem beside its source, see the comparison poem examples.