W101.V2. Day 5. Musings of a Muse

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

~ T. S. Eliot

I‌ don’t know where to begin to describe or define poetry. I believe that poetry is the art of showing the world in a light it has never been seen in. It isn’t about looking at something new. It isn’t about looking at something with a new look.

Poetry is the art of finding a new way to look.

Then what about the poet?‌ Is the poet merely a looking glass or a window to the world that was never opened? John Keats sums it up with his quote:

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity

John Keats

Does a poet do nothing except enabling the people around to see the world with the eyes of the poet?‌ Then can they never be the source but a mere viewing point? To answer this, I‌ call upon neither a poet nor a real person, but a fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes.

You’ve never been the most luminous of people, but as a conductor of light, you are unbeatable.

Sherlock Holmes

If that’s the case, then shouldn’t all poets be accused of plagiarism? This reminds of a different post of mine. It’s called Copy Pasting and it deals with a different aspect of plagiarism.

Zooming in to the example, shouldn’t every author and every “creator” be called plagiarists? If we take all the works in the English language alone, everything that we see is going to be a rearrangement of the twenty-six different letters? Coming back to the concept at hand, every process of our thoughts were put in by the outside world. Since every thought process of ours is actually put into our head by the outside world – aren’t all our stories & poems, which arise from these said thought processes, actually unoriginal in nature? Aren’t all of our creations and brainwaves, anything that we thought of should be unoriginal. They came to be from the existing elements or at least have been inspired by what already exists.

Would it be right in calling one group creators because they were inspired by what exists in the world while we label another group as plagiarists because they were inspired by other creators? Or is it alright if we credited everyone and everything who had inspired us in one way or the other? That would be an easy thing for me to say and do. I have a lot of space to write about the different sources that I‌ referred to. But that’s not the case with all art forms. Not all forms of art have space to honour their sources. And not all the times do we even know that we have been inspired.

About that last point of not knowing when we copied, there’s this neat video that talks about that aspect of creativity, called: Why YOUR IDEA’S NOT ORIGINAL (and what YOU can do about it) by Jamie Windsor.

Among other things, he talks about cryptomnesia. A‌ situation when we remember something, but we don’t recognize how the memory was made. In other words, the forgotten memory has returned but we think it’s a new and original idea. He goes on to talk about a few times this happened in real life and for himself and finishes the video with tips to break the habit.

While that is something you can check out if you’re feeling doubtful about the credibility and plagiarism, accidental or otherwise, I’m all ears about what you have to say about the subject. The comments section is quite empty enough (as of the time of writing this). Feel free to let out whatever thoughts you had got from here.