Not as a star But I’m warning you, this is my last existence. Not as a swallow, not as a maple, not as a cat-tail and not as a star. Anna Akhmatova, The Elements of Typographic Style deathzen
A fresh focus of power The demand for “originality”—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time. The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which former streams of beauty, emotion, and reflection are directed. This view is adopted, and perhaps carried to excess, by writers like T. S. Eliot, some of whose poems are a close web of quotations and adaptations, chosen for their associative value, or like James Joyce, who makes great use of the associative value of sounds and syllables. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker On TheftThe signature novelty