"[Writing] is Theft" Ctd Thomas Lynch, Yeats, Auden, Heaney, etc.

 

On the death of Seamus Heaney, Michigan-based undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch paid tribute to the Irish poet on BBC Radio 3 with an essay which spoke on the role of combinatorial creativity. He said:

"I stole that thing about a bridge from another poet who read it somewhere or stole it from another one or made it up. It's what we do, rent to own. Borrow, steal, make things up... When Auden got word of Yeats' death he wrote his famous elegy in memory of William Butler Yeats in which he gives his own directive, borrowing the dead man's table manners:

"Earth receive an honored guest

William Yeats is laid to rest,

Let the Irish vessel like emptied of its poetry."

When Brodsky died, too young, too soon in 1996 Heaney borrowed for Audenesque the rhyme and meter that Auden borrowed from Yeats, and Yeats from Blake and Blake from maybe a children's rhyme."