Writers have attempted to provide the sentence meaning through context, one of the first of which were written by Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson (1959) and Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao (1997). John Hollander wrote a poem titled "Coiled Alizarine" in his book "The Night Mirror" which ends with Chomsky's sentence. Clive James wrote a poem titled "A Line and a Theme from Noam Chomsky" in his book "Other Passports: Poems 1958–1985". It opens with Chomsky's second meaningless sentence and discusses the Vietnam War.