Tag: Plagiarism

Criminal man has lost all enterprise and originality.

And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

Those with no memory insist on their originality.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.

Great poets steal.

The one and the only.

All my best thoughts!

Stolen by the ancients.

Ah! Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht!

Truth! stark, naked truth, is the word; and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze wrapper on it, but paint situations such as they actually rose to me in nature, careless of violating those laws of decency that were never made for such unreserved intimacies as ours; and you have too much sense, too much knowledge of the originals, to sniff prudishly and out of character at the pictures of them.

Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.

Mature poets steal.

Nothing new except what has been forgotten.

It’s not a real leg, only a false leg.

And there’s a mighty difference between a living thump and a dead thump.

O! Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

Let a splinter swerve.

It hath it original from much grief, from study, and perturbation of the brain.

Great artists steal.

The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself—a most curious relic—are still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not be understood affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale, and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within the limits of the old Surveyor’s half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly, or altogether, as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.

Necessary to any originality: the courage to be an amateur.

It is all for the taking.

Great artists.

We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

The great artist who is truly schizophrenic will break the wall, reaching the unknown country where he does not belong to any age, any environment, any school.

And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.

Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?

You pray to the gods? Let me grant your prayers.

It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind.

The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves.

Criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

To imagine is to misinterpret, which makes all poems antithetical to their precursors.

Who are your parents? Do you know?

The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

The death of Patroclus, Iliad XVI:

Even as he spoke, the shadow of death came over him. His soul fled from his limbs and went down to the house of Hades, bemoaning its fate, leaving manhood and youth.

Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem.

There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long.

New poems originate mainly from old poems.

Ivan Goncharov was essentially deranged in the last thirty years of his life.

And insisted that every word Turganev published had been stolen from him.

All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above, and the double lash of your mother and your father’s curse will whip you from this land one day, their footfall treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light!

The primary struggle of the young poet is against the old masters.

The father is perceived as an obstacle.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

The death of Hector, Iliad XXII:

Even as he spoke, the shadow of death came over him. His soul fled from his limbs and went down to the house of Hades, bemoaning its fate, leaving manhood and youth.

The ephebe must clear imaginative space for himself through a creative misreading of the strong poets of the past.

The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.

Only strong poets can overcome this anxiety of influence.

Picasso: He was my one and only master. Cézanne! It was the same with all of us—he was like our father.

Lesser lights become derivative flatterers and never achieve poetic immortality for themselves.

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

To you, your father should be as a god;
One that compos’d your beauties, yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax
By him imprinted, and within his power
To leave the figure or disfigure it.

Mom and pop, they will fuck you up.

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

Poetic misreading or misprison proper.

A corrective movement in his own poem. A swerve.

A breaking device, a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor.

But they were fucked up in their turn.

Sublime.

Counter-sublime.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child.

The return of the dead.

As though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.

To imagine after a poet is to learn his own metaphors for his acts of reading.

A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be.

Man hands on misery to man.

There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations.