I'm glad Lightman is on the case. With so many poets and so small an audience for poetry, it's easy for plagiarism to go undetected. If "intertextuality" has come to mean stealing other writers' words without attribution, then I'm glad Lightman is calling it by its true name. The same advice we routinely give to students writing term papers should apply to poetry: if you use someone else's words, unless those words are so familiar that most well-educated readers will recognize them, you should acknowledge who you're borrowing from.
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