Where there is conscious appropriation, the motive would seem to me to be a form of sheer admiration: I want to have written that! (So I will -- have written that!)
But, but, I was (and am) actually guilty of unconscious appropriation of a line by W. B. Yeats. (Not telling which line!) When I was a callow, shallow, youth I unknowingly absorbed a (brilliant, it still seems to me) Yeats line, and then spat it out like a mother bird feeding her nestlings into a poem that I then went on to take in its own direction. It was only after I got a variorum Yeats to study (and, boy-howdy, I did) that I read the line I thought was mine in his work. Then I remembered reading him enthusiastically long before I got the variorum. Guilty I am, but it's a single line, and I really admire Yeats for my use of it. His is good, too.
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