ABSTRACT
Philosophical and literary tradition holds that the following two conditions must be met: novelty and value. There is, unsurprisingly, a large amount of controversy about just how both conditions should be spelt out. Nonetheless, there is a surprising amount of agreement that both conditions are required. Literary creativity is a function of the agential processes that bring the text about, the literary values realized in or through the text and the relations in which the resultant work stands to other literary works. Whatever the most useful basic taxonomy is, and indeed by which criteria particular works fall under one category rather than another, may partly depend on the uses to which people want to put such categorizations. Samuel Taylor Coleridge says that whilst in the dream he has the sense of composing at least two to three hundred lines and, upon awakening, busily sets to transcribing the poem down.
