^* Not only history, but poetry too has its topos and tropos: “In poetry, a place is where something is known, but a figure or trope is when something is willed or desired. A Classical or Enlightenment ‘commonplace’ is where something is already known, but a Romantic or Post-Enlightenment ‘place’ is a more inventive and indeed a Gnostic ‘knowing,’ a knowing in which one sees what Walter Benjamin called the aura. In the aura what is known knows the knower” (Bloom, 69).