Art Blanc
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Posts tagged copy
Picasso’s Loot

I’ll leave off with the source of the “good artists” quote. It’s often attributed to Pablo Picasso, but it turns out it’s a bastardized version of a quote from a T.S. Eliot essay.

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.

Huh, didn’t know that, but always better to know the original source.

(via ME & HER)