HOW TO STEAL

Picasso’s famous quote that good artists create and great artists steal has already been covered here.

And true to Picasso’s great quote, it seems that he stole this? Or is it that great minds think alike? Who knows if Picasso even really said this.

It was nevertheless refreshing to come across T.S. Eliot’s meditation on copying and appropriation, some of which has been covered here. Published in 1920, his book The Sacred Word stated:

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was 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.”

I maintain that it is our method that will establish the greatest cultural value. And T.S. Eliot’s passage starts to suggest the components of that method. His use of the concepts cohesion, unique feeling, and remoteness of borrowing, start to enrich our method.  Indeed, he is telling us how to steal.