Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he deployed in his poems.
Mark Ford gets granular at the London Review of Books in an extended review of two new volumes of Eliotica recently published by Faber. He describes T.S. Eliot’s postmodern plagiarism and self-plagiarism, his brilliant, copious annotations, and links it to the communal well of the Internet.
