"Art may be theft . . . but it doesn't follow that theft is art"

David Shield's reality, as seen through the lens of Shelley, Wordsworth, and Harold Bloom in n+1:

The interesting formal and thematic qualities of literature mostly take place in-between simple imitation of an out-there reality and simple quotation of an out-there text: there are things called “tropes,” a word that comes from “turn” in Greek, and implies the transformation of something into something else: metaphors, metonymies, catachreses, metalepses, for instance. On a thematic level, there’s Milton turning Homer’s council of the Achaeans into a cavalier council of devils, Wordsworth and Coleridge identifying the modern self with Milton’s Satan escaping from Hell. Percy Bysshe Shelley called this system of appropriation “The Great Cyclic Poem,” from which all poems come and to which all poems return, a gene pool or expanding universe of poetry. But Shelley’s vision also required authors to accept a large degree of impersonality. They were catalysts, or “unacknowledged legislators,” not celebrated privateers . . .