Creative Genius

[...[  creative literary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas; that is rather the business of the philosopher: the grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not analysis and discovery; its gifts lie in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations, —making beautiful works with them, in short.

Matthew Arnold, 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time', in Essays by Matthew Arnold including Essays in Criticism, 1865 On Translating Homer (With F.W. Newman’s Reply) and Five Other Essays now for the first time collected (London: Oxford University Press, 1914): pp. 9-36 (p. 12).

Great Poets

Great poets seldom make bricks without straw; they pile up all the excellencies they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, and they set their own inimitable light atop of the mountain.

Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1952; 1910), p. 162.

Original Thinking

Mark Pattison, Memoirs of an Oxford Don (London: Cassell, 1988; 1885), pp. 51-52:

A man who does not know what has been thought by those who have gone before him is sure to set an undue value upon his own ideas – ideas which have perhaps been tried and found wanting. As accumulated learning stifles the mental powers, so original thinking has been known to bring about a puffy, unsubstantial mental condition.

Originality

T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 23:

To assert that a work is ‘original’ should be very modest praise: it should be no more than to say that the work is not patently negligible.