ABSTRACT
For differing reasons the literary critic, the copyright lawyer and the teacher as well, of course, as the forensic linguist, are all interested in texts which apparently borrow from other texts – particularly when the borrowing is not acknowledged. With the T.S. Eliot example above it is assumed that the reader will recognize the reference to Shakespeare, but Eliot’s readers were not always willing to accept that his borrowings were deliberate intertextual references, rather than the theft of a ‘well-rounded’ phrase. Indeed, Eliot had to defend himself in an interview in August 1961:
In one of my early poems [‘Cousin Nancy’] I used, without quotation marks, the line ‘the army of unalterable law …’ from a poem by George Meredith, and this critic accused me of having deliberately plagiarized, pinched, pilfered that line. Whereas, of course, the whole point was that the reader should recognize where it came from and contrast it with the spirit and meaning of my own poem.
