Levinas's philosophy of alterity — the radical otherness of the Other who makes an ethical claim on the self — has deeply influenced poets like Jorie Graham, whose work enacts the speaker's encounter with faces, bodies, and presences that resist assimilation; In "The Waste Land," Eliot stages alterity through the cacophony of voices and languages that cannot be unified, suggesting that modernity is constituted by irreducible otherness; Celan's use of the second person (du) in his poetry performs alterity as an address to the dead, to God, and to the reader, making the poem a site of ethical encounter with radical difference; A poet writing across cultural difference — translating a poem, or writing in response to another tradition — might foreground alterity as the philosophical condition of the exchange, acknowledging that the other's difference is not reducible to the self's categories; Postcolonial poetry frequently deploys the concept of alterity to examine how colonialism constructed indigenous peoples as radically other while simultaneously denying the full otherness — the irreducible subjectivity — of colonized people; Rainer Maria Rilke's "Archaischer Torso Apollos" presents the artwork as radical alterity — the statue that "sees" the viewer — enacting the Levinasian structure of being called into question by the other