There is no set of cultural references presumed to be shared by all educated readers. Eliot's notes to the Waste Land already posit the end of a common Victorian culture of reading. Pound takes this a step further. So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that there is a common, mainstream Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril. (He can say it, obviously, but I simply don't agree on this one point.) I could argue that the New York School of Poetry is the poetic mainstream, bringing together Auden, French surrealism, and the American avant-garde of WCW and Wallace Stevens. Yet I don't want to argue that. My autotranslations from the Spanish brought home this point to me. I feel free to refer to anything I know about, even something I learned of only yesterday. I don't assume any one reader will share any or all of my own references. In fact, my ideal reader is one who would get about 80%. I like the aleatory nature of the process, and the fact that those who read these poems in Spanish might understand a different set of referents. I'm not including footnotes.