The Great Refrain Robbery
Fintan O’Higgins considers why nicking ideas from other writers should not be attempted by the common literary criminal
‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’
This is a great quotation. So good, in fact, that it seems to be attributed to nearly everybody you’ve heard of: there’s a version credited to Picasso and another to Lionel Trilling. Judging by the several painstaking minutes I spent on the internet, contemporary scholarship is bit vague about who first came up with this idea. In this exact form, however, it was Eliot.
The crucial point being made, of course, is that the stature of an artist has an effect on the stuff they nick from other people. Mediocre artists can refer to a better artist’s work, but they can’t make it their own. A poet as allusive and as good as Eliot is in a great position to saunter around the shopping centre of literature and stuff as much material up his jumper as he can. Often his references are direct allusions. In ‘Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg’, for instance:
How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut
This is a direct parody of Edward Lear’s ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear’.
Under normal circumstances, Eliot’s snaffling of this little rhyme would be the equivalent of a big boy stealing a little boy’s lunch money. Eliot, however, had a bit of a blind spot when it came to nonsense poetry. His own is really not very good, where Lear’s is some of the best. Lear’s sad little song is genuinely inventive and wistful:
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
Eliot’s seems a bit too self-consciously self-deprecating. (Mirza Murad Ali Beg was the name of Eliot’s cat, by the way; Foss was the name of Lear’s. I know who I’d rather hang out with.)
A less obvious example of Eliot’s magpie-like plundering is one of his most famous lines. When the very annoying American band The Crash Test Dummies released a song called ‘Afternoons and Coffeespoons’, they were decidedly imitating (or borrowing from) Eliot, but Eliot himself got the idea from Pope. Here’s a bit from an ‘Epistle to Mrs Teresa Blount’, describing a bored lady back in the country after a coronation:
She went from opera, park, assembly, play,
To morning-walks, and prayers three hours a-day:
To part her time ‘twixt reading and bohea,
To muse, and spill her solitary tea;
Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,
Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon …
That’s measuring out your life in coffee spoons, isn’t it? And if I can locate that bit of Pope, it’s probably fair to assume that Eliot could too. But Eliot has made it entirely his own. And that’s what successful theft is all about.
