Allusion is a brief, usually indirect reference to person, place or event--- real or frictional or to a work of art, famous historical or literary figure of event.
“ Get off that roof! who do you think you are, Spiderman? ”
Allusion is a figure of speech making casual reference to a famous historical or literary figure or event, or to another work of literature. Of the poems we’ve read so far, Swift’s “ A Description of the Morning “ could be said to allude to a generic or stock character of Restoration literature when we learn that “Betty from her master’s bed had flown.”
A more obvious moment of allusion appears in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” When the speaker declares, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, “ he assumes that have read or seen a production of Shakespeare’s play, and that we will know that in making his negative comparison (allusion is a kind of metaphor), he is saying that his indecisiveness has nothing like the tragic dimensions of Hamlet’s.