Free software as poetry
As I was looking for an online presentation of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men to refresh my memory for the previous entry, I stumbled upon Jough’s explanation of why his site is called Plagiarist.com (“an online archive of the world’s finest poetry”).
How very like the Free Software ethos this is, and why it wonderfully grips me —
One of the surest of tests 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 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.
—T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). “Philip Massinger”
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1922.
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