myownsatellite wrote:Go read T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
I tried to read/understand that the best I could but didn't have much luck.
Is he trying to say that if your a poet or writer you must have at one point read the classics such as Homer? Therefore (sometime subliminal, sometimes on purpose) you as a new poet/writer will copy elements of Homer in some way shape or form so that in the end nothing is really original.
Incorporating 'some' elements of a classic into a new piece of work may be inevitable. I'm sure at some point George Lucas took parts of 2001: A Space Odessey, just as Kubrick may had taken ideas from someone else. But their still very different movies. Obviosuly Lucas put some creative throught process into his work.
But with all these cookie cutter comic flicks there is little originality. It's already been writen 30 years ago now just adpated for the big screen and aimed to the widest audience posible in order to rake in the most money possible.