Poetry Scandals: Plagiarism Throughout the Ages

Poetry, like all art forms, has a deep history of plagiarism. That said, the true meaning of poetic plagiarism has changed over time. Join me in this video essay as we take a look at some of poetry's most prominent cases of plagiarism.

0:00 Intro: Aliza Grace
3:05 The Renaissance: William Shakespeare
7:03 Romanticism: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
10:50 Modernism: T. S. Eliot
16:12 Postmodernism
17:02 Christian Ward
17:52 David R. Morgan
18:35 Graham Nunn
19:27 Andrew Slattery
20:35 C.J. Allen
21:08 Pierre DesRuisseaux
22:07 Sheree Mack
25:07 Ailey O'Toole
26:10 Conclusion: Why poets plagiarize

P.O. Box 901989 Sandy, UT 84090

Editor: Khabi Javan

Music:

#poetry #poem #poems #literature #writing #creativewriting #plagiarism #shakespeare #tseliot

[RoughestDrafts]

Poems by Ewan Hardie
The One About the Boy and Nothing by Ankur Bhanderi
Poems by Lauryn Farragher
"Mister Wink" by The Quiet One

And if you submitted work but don't see it in this first video, don't worry, I'm just taking the submissions as they come. As always, thanks for the support!

[tomfoolery-]

:/ I wish you'd mentioned earlier that you didn't want us to harass William Shakespeare. I've already written up and nailed a whole callout parchment for the bulletin in the village square. He'll be abrogated for sure!

[Luigiofthegods]

The most significant finding of this video is the knowledge that Joel's real name is Henry

[lordfreerealestate]

Rupi Kaur has also faced a LOT of plagiarism allegations - by Nayirrah Waheed, Parvana Reddy. There have been eerie similarities to the works of Warsan Shire, Pablo Neruda, and other poets. Yet she is given the title of "the woman who saved poetry and made it popular." She also refused for years to even respond to the allegations. It's hard to wrap your head around.

[bigsmallboii]

I think there is a tradition of allusion in poetry that is under-acknowledged here.
There are 4 levels of "allusion" that I can determine.

1. Referencing. Like when Dante in La Commedia speaks by name of various historical figures, or when Herman Melville repeatedly discusses The Bible in Moby Dick.

2. Allusion. Much more in the vein of T.S. Eliot. For example, in The Waste Land, Eliot writes "O Lord thou pluckest me out / O lord thou pluckest me // burning". These lines can be found in The Confessions of St. Augustine, written hundreds of years before. Though one could say that this is plagiarism, it's not like Eliot is taking the entirety of St. Augustines Confessions and trying to pass it off as his own, and I think that is the important distinction. If Eliot were to have taken an entire chapter of St. Augustines Confessions, then put it into The Waste Land and tried to pass it off as his own, that would be plagiarism. But alluding to various lines from various sources does not seem to me plagiarism.

3. Imitation. Take for example, Thomas Grays translations. Some of them are called "translations" (i.e. "Translation of [Torquato] Tasso"; and they are indeed just translations), and some are "imitations" (i.e. "Imitation of Propertius"). The difference is that the imitation is essentially just playing as, say, Propertius, or Horace, or whoever else. It speaks like them, writes like them, uses their ideas, etc.
Imitation without credit is plagiarism. They're taking other poets work, but unlike Gray, not acknowledging that they're mostly taking, and not suffusing it with any original work. What Eliot was doing was not imitation - it was allusion. What Gray did (in some of his 'translations' - not his original poems) is imitation, but because he acknowledges the debt, there is no issue. The issue with Aliza Grace is that there's no honesty about the imitation: they're just taking without accrediting.

4. Quotation. Like that of Marianne Moore's, who simply placed quotation marks around derived material. I don't see a need to elaborate.

I acknowledge the differences because plagiarism is a damning accusation, and should not be thrown around willy nilly, thus accidentally victimizing allusive poets and weakening criticism of plagiarism.

Without allusion, we lose intertextuality in poetry.

What Eliot and what Shakespeare did is not plagiarism, but allusion.

[LylWren]

I haven't watched the whole video yet because I've paused to read the plagiarized poems. It strikes me how like with Somerton's plagiarism through the act of stealing work and presenting it as one's own it makes it more inauthentic and flatter. Specifically the poem by Kristina Mahr "You Won't Know This"

That specific poem (which I have never read before today) has a rhythm to it and is vulnerable. (I don't know if others would consider it good, but it touched my heart.) But in changing the poem to plagiarize it, Aliza grace destroyed the rhythm and feeling of it all.

When I watched Hbomb's Plagiarism video one of the instances of stolen work jumped out at me. The very personal story a trans man told about his feelings around the movie Mulan. Somerton is obviously not a trans man so he had to scrub all personal touches from his presentation on Mulan and in doing so took the human quality out of what he was making.

Plagairism isn't just stealing. By its very nature it destroys what makes art personal...because its not personal. Its fucking stolen and any semblance of vulnerability, nuance, and personal touch is destroyed in order to hide the crime. I'll probably have more to say once I watch the rest of the video (currently I'm at 1:14). But already my teeth are grinding a bit lol.

[jesseerven]

*drops sick reference to famous past works * 200 years later people saying i stole it ;-;

[MissCaraMint]

I wouldn’t consider the renaissance writers plagiarism simply because they were doing something commonly accepted at the time, and I’m not a huge fan of retroactively applying such criteria. Shakespeare for example isn’t remembered for how original his stories are, but how well he wrote his prose. Yes things like his description of Cleopatra’s barge in Antony and Cleopatra were taken from historical sources, but he did reword it beautifully into poetry, and that’s kind of what mattered at the time. Especially since the historical works in question would probably have been commonly known, so it’s not like him doing it was this dark secret. I imagine it would have been kind of like putting a fun spin on a famous quote today. Like opening a book with “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an accountant”. We know where most of this quote comes from, because it’s famous, and then it’s got a twist at the end because I guess that’s funny. Writers do this all the time, and it works when we are all in on the joke. It’s a far cry from some of the things you mentioned, which are pretty serious in my opinion.

[scottyb]

I just don't understand how professionals can tell students "if you plagiarize on any assignment, you can be kicked out of your program" but then when they do it on a THESIS for a Ph.D and lose their jobs they find it "too harsh"...
Like no one is mobbing you in the streets, you are literally reaping what you've sown

[Radiinactivity]

My problem in the case of people like Sheree Mack and other people calling themselves victims of "witch hunts" is that I have a hard time feeling bad for them when they become lauded and well liked poets off the back of other people's work. They make MONEY despite stealing other people's words, money that their victims will probably never see. I'm sorry she felt like jumping off a bridge but at the same time, what about the people who she stole from? how many of them felt a similar despair to having their work taken, how many of them would love to have the kind of money that Christian Ward or Graham Nunn or that broad from Tik Tok have made off the backs of their work? Sheree Mack lost her lecturer position at a university but it was a PAID position. None of her victims got to enjoy that. So no, I don't feel sorry for her nor anyone else of her ilk.

[raddioli]

I may come off as a bitter cynic, but if you ask me, there's really only one reason someone consciously plagiarizes: greed. Not just in terms of money (let's be frank here, there isn't much money in writing) but also in terms of prestige and social status. While poetry is less popular than prose there is a certain ring to being a "poet". Some of these "poets" recognize that they aren't all that good at writing but don't have a wish to improve, so they'll just skip that and change up someone else's work and hope nobody catches on, and it seems that it's easier to do that with poetry. Getting to write "New York Times bestseller" in your bio is far more important than maintaining your morality and integrity.
But while that is pretty disheartening it's also good that the plagiarized parties are speaking up and we get to find out who wrote the poems we enjoy.

[Aluenvey]

Indeed I've noticed a consistent pattern with people whom plagiarize. There is one well known YA author ( I have my own theories on why the YA Dystopian genre itself blew up how it did ) is to him he seems to think IP theft is perfectly fine as long as you're lifting off a corporation.

And yet in my case I've had passages from my work repeatedly stolen from by people like this, and often without attribution. And that's just with novels. It's gotten to the point where I've had to publish my own work on my own website and completely block all known web scrapers.

But there was this one guy on twitter, who was part of this one anime fandom, that basically ripped off premise and some elements of my work.

I genuinely have no idea why people defend stuff like this.

[favouriteK]

Thanks for sending me down a rabbit hole!

My hot take: Aliza Grace doesn't exist. Minus other signs of me going "hmm this sounds fake, " I don't think she's a person. Well, there's a person behind the name, but her name isn't Aliza (or Elodie) Grace and she's not a teen author.

I noticed, when looking up her "books" on Amazon, that "Art of Letting Go" is copywritten. To the US Copyright Office! There are 2 "Art Of Letting Go" from 2023. One looks like an album. The other is for literary works.

Her name is Christina Valdez Ware. She was born in 1980.

She has 1 dissolved LLC (Convo Keepers, related to advertising, existed Feb 2020 - Sept 2021) and 2 currently active LLCs (Aligned Perfectly, retail shop, created April 2022; JI, professional, scientific, and technical services, created July 2022). I cannot find info on any of these companies. And considering one is active as a retail shop? There should be something.

So yeah. I think 19-year-old Aliza/Elodie Grace is actually a woman named Christina who is 44.


I know your video is on plagiarism but you did this to me so you get to reap the rewards.

[Pm-jfmw]

You’re leading by example with your consistent citations, bravo. Great video

[vvitch-mist]

I can understand how Renaissance writers didn't stake claim on any one idea or another. There was very few people writing, and fewer ideas floating around. As time went on we got more and more original works, and then it became necessary.'

I'm a writer and I could NEVER ever accidentally submit the incorrect manuscript. You can't, like even if it's printed on paper you would never accidentally print the wrong one. Also why are the adding the work into their own work if someone else's work was a guide. I have used tons of sources for inspiration for my work, but I would never ever just copy-paste text into my document. Never.

[wiiseeyou]

I think paradoxically a way to influence plagiarists to stop is maybe to start being open with our inspirations, and maybe post them side by side to our own.
"Here is a poem I like. And here is a version I did but with my own ideas" and such works can be very similar and then let the wider public decide what's ok or not.
That would take away any excuses as "I forgot to remove your poem when I copied it."

[dellh]

Using the Sakespeare line about Brutus not being taken alive is a bad example of copyright infringement. Brutus was a real man whom the Roman people really wouldn't take alive, considering his crime. Does Plutarch own the idea of Brutus being in hotwater after killing Juilius Ceaser in real life?

[AychNoir]

I have for some reason thought "poetry is dead" ('cause of the lack of poetry channels here) but turns out TikTok is taking the lead in shooting things up...including well plagiarism.

[theschoolofplot]

This was a great video! I’m glad we’re shifting to a normalisation of citations. Something I see a lot online is when quotes get misattributed or detracted from ownership or context (“Someone once said” / “I once read”). It’s pretty normal in daily conversation, but gets murkier in online content. Which is tricky because a lot of online content is structured like organic conversation. I feel like online there’s also a culture of “everyone owns everything and nobody owns anything” which gets pretty uncomfortable sometimes

[mollybeechwood]

using someone else's written words as scaffolding for your own and then "forgetting" to remove the traces is an absolutely nuts thing to say holy shit. Also this is another great video