John James: Should Poets Steal?

I was recently reading Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010) when I came across a poem titled, “Dream of a Poetry of Defense,” a mash-up, according to Donnelly’s notes, of excerpts from Percy Shelley’s 1821 essay, “A Defence of Poetry” and section 13.5 of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004). Reading Donnelly in conjunction with T.S. Eliot, I began to notice a trend—one that had announced itself previously, but never so apparently problematic as at that moment: Poets steal, and that’s a fact. But at what point do writers become unaware of who they are stealing from; when, if at all, does it matter?

In the cases of Donnelly and Eliot, both poets draw on largely original sources. Shelley’s essay, as far as I can tell, doesn’t attempt to rip off Byron or Coleridge. And I doubt the authors of the Commission Report have read a poem since they encountered “The Road Not Taken” in English 101 (Had they, perhaps the U.S. would have taken a different “road” in 2003). Eliot, of course, draws primarily on the classics—Homer, Dante, The Bible, Shakespeare—but also on his near contemporaries, like Baudelaire and Hesse. Here, the poets know precisely from whom they are stealing, and the context in which the lines originally appeared. Thus, the allusion is rendered perfectly clear.

The problem with stealing from The Waste Land, however, is that nearly every line comes from another source. And while those sources are mediated, even reworked by Eliot—who then creates meaning through juxtaposition and disjunction—the original reference remains clear. Moreover, allusion, in Eliot, serves a vital purpose: that of compression. Without it, The Waste Land might have sprawled over twelve books.[1] Similarly, these excerpted borrowings serve a poignant function in Donnelly’s poem as well. The poet counter-points two radically different texts to create a single poem that, through the immediate topicality of one, satirizes the poet’s political environment; and through the other, fashions an important statement on the role of poetry to actively affect our cultural landscape (which, by the way, it does).

But who is to stop a poet, particularly a young, naïve poet, from pulling lines from Eliot and unknowingly referencing Andrew Marvell or Dante’s Purgatorio? And if we could, should we stop him? So much of a budding poet’s work is made up of imitation, adoption, and rejection of certain lines, purely on an instinctual basis—of the poet discovering whether she prefers Graham to Heaney, or Crane to Stevens, and pursuing the passion felt toward (or against) those works.

I don’t have an answer to this question. I fear that our culture has a short memory, and that stealing from any poet anywhere—who might have stolen from any poet, anywhere—risks the further clouding of that remembrance. But such, I suppose, is inevitable. Really, all of this was to say, I’ll give you a quarter if you can tell me where the following lines come from (without Googling them!). Eliot would know, and I’d venture to bet Donnelly would too.

My first thought was, he lied in every word,

That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

Askance to watch the working of his lie…[2]

[2] Give up? The lines are from Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland,” which draws on King Lear. Browning perfected the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, which Eliot “borrowed” from him a generation later in poems like “Prufrock” and “Gerontion,” and to some extent in The Waste Land.