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.

Understahl, Jennifer.  "Copyright Infringement and Poetry: When is a Red Wheelbarrow the Red Wheelbarrow?"  Vanderbilt Law Review
        58.3 (2005): 915-54.

        Understahl observes that courts apply a substantial similarity test when determining whether a particular work of literature infringes existing copyright.  She argues that courts fail to take into account the difference between different literary genres, and subsequently that different genres call for varying thresholds of originality.  Moreover, courts lack a clear standard for establishing substantial similarity, disagreeing on the application of the "pattern" and "total concept and feel" tests, as well as on whether the burden of recognizable infringement should fall to the "lay observer" or to an "intended audience."  The various expressive works encompassed by the umbrella term "literature" thus merit the formulation of individual standards for establishing substantial similarity.  For instance, literature often features phrases in which the sound complements the sense.  The sounds created by juxtaposing certain words can carry significance, as when a phrase describing Satan contains an abundance of sibilants, evoking the hiss of the serpent frequently employed to depict Satan in illustrations.  If the same phrase occurs in an op-ed column about a celebrity, the context largely determines that readers will attend to the sense, and assume that effects of sound are incidental. 

        In essence, Understahl argues that the idea/expression dichotomy collapses in the case of literary.  Adopting Pound's dictum that poetry is "the most concentrated form of verbal expression, she suggests that poetry warrants the lowest minimal standard for originality.  Typographical decisions, most notably features like the placement of the poem on the page, line length, enjambment, spacing, and strophic organization, all create substantial dissimilarities between copyrighted text and "new" writing, when justified as integral to that which the poem is designed to express.  Moreover, poems that borrow language from this "new" writing but cast the language in a new form ought to be determined original.  The substantial similarity test, Understahl argues, would even fail to find William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" copyrightable.  She proposes an "expressive elements" test that evaluates the relation between form and content on a sliding scale of substantial similarity, one that accounts for the features that characterize poetic expression.  The projected benefits are greater consistency in substantial similarity determinations and less overprotection.  Moore's poetry would benefit from the adoption of this test, given the prevalence of sampling and quotation.  Understahl draws on a surprisingly wide range of poets to substantiate her remarks about poetry as an art form, demonstrating the viability of the proposed test within the artistic community under consideration.  Because she mentions no cases in which the court slighted poetic originality, the issues seem prospective, if no less important.