Erasmus or Machiavelli builds up a sense of their 
“inscrutability.” Arnold’s sonnet to Shakespeare is a useful 
point of reference for anybody who needs to observe the 
literary man baffled by the non-literary.

     It was some time after printing began that authors or 
readers discovered “points of view.” Earlier, it was shown how 
Milton was the first to introduce visual perspective into poetry, 
and his work had to wait till the eighteenth century for 
acceptance. For the world of visual perspective is one of unified 
and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the 
resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last 
art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the 
first to rebound in the electric age.