Attitudes toward authorship and originality

Romantic: Individual authorship

Look, then, into thine heart, and write!

Longfellow, "Prelude," (Voices of the Night)

Classic: Shoulders of giants

True wit is nature to advantage drest,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well exprest.

Pope, Essay on Criticism

We are as dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, so that although we perceive many more things than they, it is not because our vision is more piercving or our stature higher, but because we are carried and elevated higher thanks to their gigantic size.

Bernard of Chartres, quoted in Jean Gimple's The Cathedral Builders

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