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With these few axioms in mind, let us take the case of Homer. The tales of Troy, and the two epics Homer fashioned around them (out of a precedent oral tradition), have fertilized a whole universe of literature since. Just go with the big names: Virgil fed on Homer, Dante on Homer and Virgil. Milton, saturated with a knowledge of all three, with Paradise Lost re-imagined the epic in a Christian context. In our own time, Joyce built his prose masterwork Ulysses around the bones of the Homeric saga, Yeats saw his much-wanted Maud Gonne as “another Helen,” and Derek Walcott “repositioned” the Trojan war as a “fishermen’s fight” in the Caribbean.

Literature is forged in the imagination, and the imagination feeds upon and is fired by literature

Were these writers cultural appropriators? Or were they artists, powered by their imagination, seeking in the foundational example of Homer, somewhat as apprentices seeking a master, the source and method of poetic technique, the high arts of narrative, and genius in description and imagery?

We do not put a fence around Homer. Nor do we, or should we, balkanize the imagination of creative artists. Good and great art inflects the minds of those who receive it, and even more so, those with the gifts to make their own. It is not an appropriation to seek examples outside one’s experience, it is an imperative to do so. We should not seek to put boundaries on words, or the stories — built with craft and ingenuity — words alone can build. Subject matter as such is but the beginning of artistic enterprise. What the individual imagination does with subject matter is what transmutes it into art. That is not appropriation. Writers take only what they think they can fashion to their own design. That is not disrespect, it is tribute — it is how stories, novels and poems enter into being, and if they are art, real art, more is returned than received.

Boundaries are merely what the human imagination exists to leap over, and the capacity to make that leap is what we call (or used to anyway) creativity in art and literature. Real writers know that. Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

National Post