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Figure of speech using indirect reference

Allusion is a figure of speech, in which an object or circumstance from an unrelated context is referred to covertly or indirectly. It is left to the audience to make a direct connection. Where the connection is directly and explicitly stated (as opposed to indirectly implied) by the author, it is instead usually termed a reference. In the arts, a literary allusion puts the alluded text in a new context under which it assumes new meanings and denotations. In a wider, more informal context, an allusion is a passing or casually short statement indicating broader meaning. It is an incidental mention of something, either directly or by implication, such as "In the stock market, he met his Waterloo."

In Homer, brief allusions could be made to mythic themes of generations previous to the main narrative because they were already familiar to the epic's hearers: one example is the theme of the Calydonian boarhunt. In Hellenistic Alexandria, literary culture and a fixed literary canon known to readers and hearers made a densely allusive poetry effective; the poems of Callimachus offer the best known examples. Martin Luther King Jr., alluded to the Gettysburg Address in starting his "I Have a Dream" speech by saying "Five score years ago "; his hearers were immediately reminded of Abraham Lincoln's "Four score and seven years ago", which opened the Gettysburg Address. King's allusion effectively called up parallels in two historic moments without overwhelming his speech with details. A sobriquet is an allusion. By metonymy one aspect of a person or other referent is selected to identify it, and it is this shared aspect that makes a sobriquet evocative: for example, "the city that never sleeps" is a sobriquet of (and therefore an allusion to) New York. An allusion may become trite and stale through unthinking overuse, devolving into a mere cliché, as is seen in some of the sections below.

Andy Warhol, a 20th century American artist most famous for his pop art images of Campbell soup cans and of Marilyn Monroe, commented on the explosion of media coverage by saying, "In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes." Today, when someone receives a great deal of media attention for something fairly trivial, they are said to be experiencing their "15 minutes of fame"; that is an allusion to Andy Warhol's famous remark.

According to the Book of Genesis, chapter 19, God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, but Lot, the nephew of Abraham, was given time to escape with his family before the destruction. God commanded Lot and his family not to look back as they fled. Lot's wife disobeyed and looked back, and she was immediately turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for her disobedience. An allusion to Lot's wife or to a pillar of salt is usually a reference to someone who unwisely chooses to look back once they have begun on a course of action or to someone who disobeys an explicit rule or command.

In Greek mythology, Cassandra, the daughter of Trojan king Priam, was loved by Apollo, who gave her the gift of prophecy. When Cassandra later angered Apollo, he altered the gift so that her prophecies, while true, would not be believed. Thus, her accurate warnings to the Trojans were disregarded, and disaster befell them. Today, a "Cassandra" is someone who accurately predicts disasters or negative outcomes, especially if those predictions are disregarded.

This phrase comes from a novel by Joseph Heller. Catch 22 is set on a U. S. Army Air Force base in World War II. "Catch 22" refers to a regulation that states an airman's request to be relieved from flight duty can only be granted if he is judged to be insane. However, anyone who does not want to fly dangerous missions is obviously sane; thus, there is no way to avoid flying the missions. Later in the book the old woman in Rome explains that Catch 22 means "They can do whatever they want to do." This refers to the theme of the novel in which the authority figures consistently abuse their powers, leaving the consequences to those under their command. In common speech, "catch 22" has come to describe any absurd or no win situation.

The poetry of T. S. Eliot is often described as "allusive", because of his habit of referring to names, places or images that may only make sense in the light of prior knowledge. This technique can add to the experience, but for the uninitiated can make Eliot's work seem dense and hard to decipher.

The most densely allusive work in modern English may be Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) that unlocked some of Joyce's most obscure allusions.