Posner points out that T.S. Eliot's masterpiece "The Waste Land" is "a tissue of quotations (without quotation marks)," a fact that Eliot himself seems to have acknowledged when he elsewhere observed: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." To illustrate Eliot's point, Posner traces a memorable passage from "The Waste Land" ("The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne ... ") to Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra." He reminds us that Shakespeare borrowed and adapted this description from Sir Thomas North's translation of the work of Plutarch.
Posner rails against the current notion that nothing can be creative unless it is wholly original, and argues that copying has always been an important part of the creative process.
Via Arts & Letters Daily.
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