ABSTRACT
Back in 1875, ten years after the Civil War had demolished half of the U.S. and twentyfive years before the turn of the century that Ralph Waldo Emerson so ardently seemed to strive toward, during the period in American history that brought us American selfidentity, reconstruction, “the role of the Negro,” the “woman” question, the “Irish” question, the “Jewish” question, the “Indian” question, taxation, civilization and its emerging discontents, and so on, the American poet and theorist wrote an essay that prefigures much of the discourse around “originality” in late-twentieth-century culture. In “Of Quotation and Originality,” Emerson was trying to come to grips with a cultural inertia that he saw in the literature of his day. The central premise was that people’s minds were too burdened with the weight of previous creative work; they only took elements from the past and reconfigured them to their own taste in their present day. But Emerson, being the creative individual that he was, tried to look beneath the surface of this kind of cultural saturation. He wrote, “Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest…so are and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing-that, in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.”
