Mr Davis writes: "I am puzzled by the misunderstanding produced by my remark "self-sufficient work of art." In the context of the paragraph it appeared in, I believe it is clear. The Cantos are not self-sufficient because they require the aid of other books to understand." 1: Well there goes Virgil and Dante! 2: Hmm: Even a rudimentary understanding of intertextuality would lead one to grasp the fact that no text is sufficient unto itself. A poem is meaningful through a foreknowledge of the genre of poetry, an epic through a preunderstanding of what "epic" signifies, and thus all texts are parasitic upon one another, to a certain extent. Mallarme dreamed of Mr Davis's Le Livre--but neither he nor any other poet has actually written it. Best, Alex Davis