For the 1967 volume of her Complete Poems, Marianne Moore preceded the section devoted to endnotes with a statement about quotation and intellectual property. "A Note on the Notes" reads as follows: "A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into a donkey that finally finds itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation-marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes." In this project I hope to parse this statement, look at the history of "Poetry" and "The Octopus" to see how quotations operate and change across versions, and ask whether and why modern American poets like Moore who quote borrow or steal.