Tuesday, October 18, 2011

"Good Poets Borrow, Great Poets Steal" T S Eliot

Sources:
  1. An Unseemly Man: My Life as Pornographer, Pundit, and Social Outcast By Larry Flynt, Kenneth Ross
  2. Understanding Romeo and Juliet: a student casebook to issues, sources, and ... By Alan Hager
  3. Perspectives of Roman poetry: a classics symposium - Published for the College of Humanities and the College of Fine Arts of the University of Texas at Austin by the University of Texas Press, 1974 - History - 160 pages



1 comment:

Tiresias said...

The quote to which you refer was never actually uttered by TS Eliot. It is an adaptation of a statement which he made in his essay on Philip Massinger, collected in The Sacred Wood, which reads in full as follows:

"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. 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. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."

If you’re now encouraged to discover more about TS Eliot and his works, do visit our website at The TS Eliot Society UK, where there is a wealth of links (including to The Sacred Wood) and resources for enthusiasts and scholars.

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