Both the Latin and English languages make associations between weavers and poets especially easy and apt. We connect the two arts together, probably without realising it, whenever we talk about spinning yarns, weaving the threads of a plot, or effecting a denouement. The Romans similarly elided the two activities, as did the Greeks – the word rhapsode, meaning poet, was etymologically linked to weaving… So interwoven are the arts of weaving and literature that we are unlikely to remember (or indeed know) that the primary meaning of "subtle" is "finely woven" and that it derives from a Latin verb subtexo, to weave under.