http://tags.library.upenn.edu/tag/Intellectual_Property+authority PennTags Feed http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/voyager/40663 http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/voyager/40663 <p>Gregory, Janice.&nbsp; <em>Quotation and Modern American Poetry</em>: <em>"Imaginary Gardens with Real </em><em>Toads</em>."&nbsp; Houston, TX: Rice UP, 1996.<br /><br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gregory's study compares the poetics of quotation in T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore.&nbsp; Quotation, she argues, either draws on the authority of what a writer quotes or parodies that same authority.&nbsp; She identifies four pre-Modernist conceptions of the function of quotation, each allied with a different epoch: Christian antiquity and the medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic periods.&nbsp; Apostolic and Pauline texts quote Jesus and the Old Testament to invoke the awe of revelation, the binding force of law, and to establish their own authority.&nbsp; Medieval writers invoke the same authority from non-Christian authors, especially Aristotle.&nbsp; The Renaissance, through figures like Erasmus and Cervantes, instigates the double character of quotation, useful for authorization and parody.&nbsp; The Romantic period witnesses the rise of a discourse of originality that created immense anxiety in poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth over their belatedness in relation to great poets like Milton.&nbsp; Their rare instances of quotation are in the service of transferring authority to modern, secular forces.&nbsp; Setting this anxiety in an American context, Emerson insists in the 1830s that originality and quotation are not mutually exclusive, thus setting the stage for poetry that acknowledges a great debt to tradition but nevertheless seeks to establish an original relation to the universe.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /><br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gregory argues that Eliot, Williams, and Moore all employ quotation to explore the way authority is gendered, particularly with reference to America's belatedness in secular history.&nbsp; Borrowing on the work of Marie Borroff, Gregory demonstrates how Moore's inclusion of "promotional prose" and the text from park monuments, intimate conversations, volumes of natural history, and other non-canonical language alongside quotations from Yeats and allusions to Browning throws into question the hierarchies on which the authority of quotation rests.&nbsp; These "unauthoritative" texts enter the realm of literature for multiple purposes, among them revaluation, modest depersonalization, and the establishment maternal authority.&nbsp; Gregory also suggests that Moore's practice of quotation influenced T.S. Eliot, not the other way around, by convincing him that he could fashion poetry "out of a refusal to digest the fragments of the texts that inspired it."&nbsp; Gregory allows me to argue that Moore's practice of quotation serves several of the analogous functions that sampling serves in music, and subsequently that there might be a causal relationship between Moore's nationality and the views she held on quotation.</p>