SLSL Intro "Literary Theft"

[Dave Monroe]

   "Fascinating topic, literary theft.  As in the
penal code, there are degrees.  These range from
plagiarism down to  only being derivative, but all are
forms of wrong procedure.  If, on the other hand, you
believe taht nothing is original and that all writers
'borrow' from 'sources,' there still remains the
question of credit lines or acknowledgments." (SL,
"Intro," pp. 16-7)


>From Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory
of Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), "Introduction:
A Meditation upon Priority, and a Synopsis," pp. 5-18
...

   "Poetic history, in this book's argument, is held
to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since
strong poets make that history by misreading one
another, so as to clear imaginative space for
themselves.
   "My concern is only with strong poets, major
figures with the persistence to wrestle with their
strong precursors, even to the death.  Weaker talents
idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate
for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and
self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of
indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the
realization that he has failed to create himself?" (p.
5)

"anxiety of influence" (p. 6)

"But poetic influence need not make poets less
original; as often it makes them more original, though
not therefore necessarily better.  The profundities of
poetic influence cannot be reduced to source-study, to
the history of ideas, to the patterning of images. 
Poetic influence, or as I shall more frequently term
it, poetic misprision, in necessarily the study of the
life-cycle of the poet-as-poet." (p. 7)

"... every poet begins (however 'unconsciously') by
rebelling more strongly against the consciousness of
death's necessity than all other men and women do."
(p. 10)

Cf. ...

"When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction ultimately
we are talking about an attitude toward death." (SL,
"Intro," p. 5)

And back to Bloom, Ch. 1, "Clinamen or Poetic
Misprision," pp. 19-48 ...

   "It does happen that one poet influences another,
or more precisely, that one poet's poems influence the
poems of the other, through a genrosity of the spirit,
even a shared genrosity.  But our easy idealism is out
of place here.  Where generosity is involved, the
poets influenced are minor or weaker; the more
generosity, and the more mutual it is, the poorer the
poets involved.  And here also, the influencing moves
by way of misapprehension, though this tends to to be
indeliberate and almost unconscious.  I arrive at my
argument's central principle, which is not more true
for its outrageousness, but merely true enough:

   "Poetic Influence--when it involves two strong,
authentic poets,--always proceeds by a misreading of
the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is
actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.  The
history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say
the main tradition of Western poetry since the
Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and slef-saving
caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful
revisionism without which modern poetry as such could
not exist." (p. 30)


And from T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual
Talent," The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and
Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920) ...

   "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete
meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is
the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and
artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him,
for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean
this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely
historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall
conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what
happens when a new work of art is created is something
that happens simultaneously to all the works of art
which preceded it. The existing monuments form an
ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art
among them. The existing order is complete before the
new work arrives; for order to persist after the
supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must
be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the
relations, proportions, values of each work of art
toward the whole are readjusted; and this is
conformity between the old and the new."

[...]

"To conform merely would be for the new work not
really to conform at all; it would not be new, and
would therefore not be a work of art."

[...]

"What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must
develop or procure the consciousness of the past and
that he should continue to develop this consciousness
throughout his career.
   "What happens is a continual surrender of himself
as he is at the moment to something which is more
valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality."

[...]

"... it is not the 'greatness,' the intensity, of the
emotions, the components, but the intensity of the
artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under
which the fusion takes place, that counts."

[...]

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an
escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality.  But, of
course, only those who have personality and emotions
know what it means to want to escape from these
things."

http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/eliot.html

http://mason-west.com/Eliot/tradition.shtml

"Talent borrows, genius steals" --T.S. Eliot?  Osacr
Wilde?  Steven Patrick Morrissey?  Let me know ...

In the meantime, e.g., ...

Meltzer, Francoise.  Hot Property: The Stakes
   and Claims of Literary Originality.  Chicago:
   U of Chicago P, 1994.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/12483.ctl

Stewart, Susan.  Crimes of Writing: Problems in
   the Containment of Representation.  New York:
   Oxford UP, 1991.

http://www.oup-usa.org/docs/0195066170.html

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