Balderdash!
First, I will start off, by saying that I'm in a bad mood so this entry may sound a little angry. Ye be warned. And here be me quote (It's early in the morning people, humor me!)
"The parallel between the two poems, then, seems so close that, rather than simply an allusion used for contrast, Donne's seventeenth-century "Song" may be a source of Eliot's twentieth-century "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (Blythe and Sweet).
This is balderdash! Ok, not really but I could definately make a case that his plagarism was unintensional. Throughout history, many billions of people have lived. One person's ideas are not entirely original because someone else has probably thought them before. Even though these stories are close, and maybe it was a source, it is definately possible that this all was a big coincidence. Wow that wasn't as angry as I had at first imagined....The mind is a strange thing.
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Kaitlin Monier on Balderdash!: I agree, the poem was defiantl
Ally Hall on Balderdash!: Angela, I agree with you. I w
Lauren Miller on Balderdash!: I agree, Angela. I think that
Dennis G. Jerz on Balderdash!: Ah, so you found the article.
Ah, so you found the article. Good!
Poems aren't scholarly papers, so a poem doesn't have to cite every source with a footnote and Works Cited list. Eliot's poem is clearly an original work, but it includes many obvious references, to Hamlet, for example. This article isn't suggesting that Eliot plagiarized, or that he did anything wrong by echoing an idea found in an earlier poem.
Blythe and Sweet are simply suggesting that one way to read Prufrock is to read it as a modernist response to Donne's poem.
I agree, Angela. I think that the similarities between the two poems are a coincidence. Blythe and Sweet's article did not do a very good job of convincing me otherwise. I used one of their comparisons (the fact that they are both love songs) in my agenda item. The comparisons that they made were just not that monumental to make me believe their claim. Like Foster said, we all end up writing things that other people have written at some point in time, whether we are aware of it or not. I'm going to need more evidence before I believe that the two poems are significantly and purposely related.
Angela, I agree with you. I was so confused throughout most of this article and I was spending too much time going through the article a second time still trying to figure out which poem it was actually supposed to be talking about, that I failed to really see how they were related. Sure, poems can be similar, after all, doesn't Foster tell us that there is no "original" work anymore? I don't think it necessarily means it has to use the ideas from one specific poem.
I agree, the poem was defiantly not plagiarized. What ever happened to the whole ideas-are-used-more-than-once?
Ok...so I guess in my original entry I was unclear. I didn't mean that Eliot plagiarized, per se. I was just being overly dramatic. I meant that I don't think that he looked at Donne's poem and said, "Hey, let me redo this story and put my own spin on it." I think that it was a mere coincidence that the two stories were so alike.