Interesting points on the nature of ownership here, from an area of writing where we might not expect to find them. Interesting too to picture the former Poet Laureate as a “shameless burglar”, although whenever I’ve seen him he looks a bit embarrassed. Read the article in full here. If you want to read a true master of uncreative writing, check out the Kenneth Goldsmith archive at Eclipse.

So what if I copied work says Sir Andrew Motion, Shakespeare did all the time

Sir Andrew Motion has been accused of “shameless burglary” by a military historian whose research he lifted and put into a poem about shell-shock for Remembrance Sunday.

The former Poet Laureate yesterday insisted that his use of quotations that he discovered in a history book belonged to a noble tradition of “found poetry” dating back to Shakespeare.

But Ben Shephard, an expert who produced The World at War for television, complained that the poet had been “extracting sexy soundbites” from his painstaking work on military psychiatry.

Motion’s poem, published as a tribute to war veterans in The Guardian on Saturday, uses quotations from soldiers and psychiatrists whose accounts Shephard spent ten years compiling. “He has no right to claim any sort of legal or moral ownership of the material,” Shephard said. “There is nothing original in this at all.”