That is the title of the new and very stimulating essay by Nabeel Qureshi.  It is difficult to summarize, but here is one excerpt:

2. Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes.

This is often harder to spot in verbal artifacts, but it is this feature that I think distinguishes really good works of art from merely ‘ok’ ones.

Most of us are familiar with the surface level ways of doing this: rhyme, for example, knits together different lines of a poem in a semantically irrelevant way that nevertheless makes it feel like part of a unifying whole. Same with assonance and other such effects most of us are familiar with from English class. It is echoes, for example, that make so many verses from the King James Bible so pleasing and beautiful to listen to:

“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” (Isaiah 60:1)

Note the echoing vowel sounds throughout in ‘arise’, ‘shine’, ‘light’, and ‘thy’. Rhyme and assonance are verbal echoes.

In music, the most famous example perhaps is Beethoven’s Fifth, with its famous “ba-ba-ba-BUM“ theme; the short-short-short-long statement in the beginning then echoes through that movement in thousands of ways, sometimes stretched, sometimes slowed down, so that the whole movement feels like an organic thing that has grown from that single seed.

Good art layers these, one on top of another, to build up artifacts of stunning complexity. These are the text equivalents of Gothic cathedrals. Each layer alludes to other layers, too, adding more and more constraints, until you get an artifact where changing any one word does violence to the whole.

To see this density in action, let’s look at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15…

Do read the whole thing.  And here are some comments from Henry Oliver.