There is an article on this subject by Joseph Epstein in the July/August of Commentary magazine.

Joseph Epstein has written for Commentary for more than 60 years. His most recent book is Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life (Simon & Schuster).

Joseph Epstein

Mr Epstein says,”After writing for publication for nearly 70 years, I ask myself: Have I ever committed the sin of plagiarism? I hope I haven’t, but I shouldn’t be entirely shocked to learn that somewhere along the way I have. Writers much better known than I have been accused of plagiarism. Among them have been Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Benjamin Franklin. Vladimir Nabokov admitted to “unconscious plagiarism,” as did Helen Keller, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Beatle George Harrison.

No surprise to learn that the greatest amount of plagiarism occurs in schools, in high schools but chiefly in colleges and universities. I’m pleased to report that over 30 years of university teaching I never caught a student plagiarizing in any of my courses. Was I, though, insufficiently on guard? Should I have been more suspicious of that young woman who sat in the back of the classroom scarcely saying a word all quarter long and yet wrote a quite brilliant paper on Joseph Conrad? Or of the young man who, when he did speak generally revealed his ignorance, then wrote a quite good paper on Portrait of a Lady? 

I have been told by colleagues that catching a student in plagiarism can be a complicated experience. Suddenly the student’s fate, at least his or her fate as a student, is in your hands, for to report a student for plagiarism could mean expulsion from the university. 

I was, of course, aware of plagiarism but failed to comprehend the extent of the phenomenon. Roger Kreuz, author of Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, a recent book on the subject, claims to have found so much of it in researching his book that, as he writes, “I must confess that this odyssey has dented my faith in human nature.”

Kreuz, a professor of psychology and dean at the University of Memphis, in scanning the broad fields of plagiarism, reports that he hoped to provide “an exploration of plagiarism’s psychological and cultural aspects [that] can help us make sense of what it is and why it happens so often.” Kreuz’s index, extending from Shakespeare to Martin Luther King Jr., from Martial to Joe Biden, from Jesus (Jesus, for Chrissake!) to H.G. Wells, reads like the table of contents of Who’s Who. The claim against Jesus as a plagiarist was made by a second-century Greek philosopher named Celsus, who argued that Jesus plagiarized Plato. Others, meanwhile, have claimed that Plato himself plagiarized from earlier philosophers. 

In his preface, Kreuz notes, “I’m still surprised by who has engaged in this practice. Yes, this group includes plenty of hacks and students. But they are also joined by the highest elected officials of several countries, as well as Nobel and Pulitzer Prize recipients, bestselling authors and artists, and distinguished faculty at elite universities.” The book’s epigraph is “Plagiarism: it’s not just for mediocrities anymore.”

Plagiarism is the appropriation of the words of another without acknowledgement. While it may be a sin, it is not a crime, though infringement of copyright rights, which constitute real property, can be criminal. How many words are appropriated is crucial in determining true plagiarism. Kreuz quotes the poet Sheenagh Pugh on the point that those who plagiarize generally do not do so only once but are, in effect, repeat offenders. He adds that “the internet has made plagiarism far easier to commit, but it has also made it much easier to recognize.”

Along with standard plagiarism, in which a writer copies another person’s words without acknowledgment and claims them for his own, there is unconscious plagiarism, subconscious plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and what Kreuz calls “Teflon plagiarism,” the last being plagiarism that doesn’t seem in the least to hurt the reputation of the perpetrator. Kreuz’s prime example here is Ronald Reagan. 

Unconscious plagiarism entails committing plagiarism without being aware one is doing so. Mark Twain, Helen Keller, and Vladimir Nabokov serve as notable examples of unconscious plagiarism. In the case of Nabokov, Kreuz adduces a story with the same subject as Lolita, an older man transfixed by a female child, that Nabokov read when a young man in Berlin. He discovers another story the Russian had to have read, this one with the actual title “Lolita,” and still other stories by Salvador Dalí that likely unconsciously influenced the writing of Lolita. Finally, at his death, Nabokov left behind an unfinished novel, translated, edited, and published by his son Dimitri, also about a middle-aged man and a nymphet, which shows among other things Vladimir Nabokov’s obsession with the subject. 

Self-plagiarism exists as well, though it’s an odd charge, since how can one steal from oneself? Kreuz’s first example of it is that of the student who uses the same academic paper for two different courses. Perhaps the most notorious instance of self-plagiarism, noted by Richard Posner in his The Little Book of Plagiarism, was that committed by Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy,who is said to have sent the same love letters to his wife and his mistress. I offer another example—myself. A few months ago, I sent an opinion piece to the Wall Street Journal, only to be told that it was remarkably similar to a piece of mine they had printed seven years earlier—a case, you might say, of self-plagiarism and unconscious plagiarism combined. The greatest self-plagiarizer, surely, is Donald J. Trump, who seems never to tire of giving the same speech, a speech that might carry the title “America Has Never Been Greater Than Under My Presidency, and It Figures Only to Get Better Yet.” 

Still, unlike other forms of plagiarism, self-plagiarism remains for the most part plagiarism without a victim. Self-plagiarism may kick in especially in old age, one of the less pleasant of whose attributes is the slippage if not serious loss of memory. (I have myself in the past month struggled to recall the name of a high school classmate, the actress Celeste Holm, and the Nixon plumber G. Gordon Liddy.)

Punishments for plagiarism differ in different realms. For scholars, they can be serious. In The Little Book of Plagiarism, Posner cites the case of Julius Kirshner, the University of Chicago historian, who published under his own name a book review written by one of his graduate students and was penalized by the university by not being permitted to teach graduate students for the next five years. 

For politicians, plagiarism tends to be viewed as less serious. Since most politicians use speechwriters, it isn’t always clear that the responsibility for their plagiarisms, when they are discovered, is truly theirs. In any case, for politicians, plagiarism doesn’t compare in seriousness, as Kreuz points out, with philandering or financial finagling. Yet, as he also notes, the accusation can be used against politicians by their enemies. Here he cites Senator Rand Paul, in a campaign speech in support of the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, comparing pro-choice advocates to eugenicists in the very same language written in a Wikipedia entry on the subject—a plagiarism happily pointed out by Rachel Maddow. 

Joe Biden was found guilty of plagiarism on more than one occasion, once in law school for copying a paper written by someone else and at other times in his campaign speeches. None of this, though widely known, prevented Barack Obama from choosing him as his vice president or kept Biden himself from becoming our 46th president. For those of us who prefer our heroes pure, the discovery of their plagiarisms, as is the case of Martin Luther King Jr.’s on his doctoral dissertation, comes as sad news. 

Another large realm for plagiarism is the commencement speech. Perhaps this is because there is not all that much beyond clichés that can be said on these occasions. Just now, the great subject for commencement speeches is artificial intelligence, but it, too, will doubtless soon be worn out and devolve into elevated platitudes. I have myself given only one commencement address and am unlikely ever to be called upon to give another, for my presence is sure to arouse the ire of the wokesters and bring out protesters. I have also written in mockery of the honorary degree, part of every college commencement ceremony, which is certain to keep me home during the months of May and June, where I am happy to be.

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While plagiarism is not a crime, for those caught at it, it is a disgrace. As Posner writes, “The stigma of plagiarism seems never to fade completely, not because it is an especially heinous offense but because it is embarrassingly second-rate; its practitioners are pathetic, almost ridiculous.”

The disgrace is easily enough avoided by attributing to its true, or original, author the words appropriated, either through quotation marks or, if the material has been paraphrased, through footnotes or endnotes. Merely changing the words slightly through the use of synonyms—known as Rogetting, after the compiler of the famous Thesaurus—won’t do and can bring on its own complications. Like nearly everyone else, I on occasion turn to Google and Wikipedia to check birth and death dates and other facts used in my own writing. In doing so, I generally attempt to change the wording of material I use. Whether this Rogetting frees me from the charge of plagiarism, I am less than certain, though I hope it does. 

Not all plagiarism is literary. Music can be plagiarized and so can painting. Martha Stewart was accused of plagiarizing recipes for her famous cookbook. Of his nearly 18,000 Peanuts cartoons, Charles Schulz, Kreuz reports, was caught out self-plagiarizing one. Some classical music is said to contain “quotations” from other musicians, but since musical notes do not allow for attributions, why this is not a form of plagiarism is less than clear. When one thinks of the scores of paintings of Mary and Jesus, mother and child, one wonders why all but the first are not acts of plagiarism. 

Then there is inadvertent plagiarism, where one forgets that one had read something elsewhere and that what one writes is one’s own. “A bookkeeping mistake made by one’s mental accountant,” Kreuz calls it. “This can result in a genuine belief that an idea, a phrase, or a melody is the product of one’s own mind instead of someone else’s.” 

Perhaps most complicated of all is the plagiarizing of ideas. On some rare occasions two people—one thinks here of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution—will come upon the same or a highly similar idea at roughly the same time. Others are only too pleased to take up the ideas of someone else and claim them as their own.

Some plagiarisms constitute creative improvement. Both Kreuz and Posner cite Shakespeare here. After quoting from the descriptions of Cleopatra on her barge from both Plutarch and Shakespeare, who appropriated it from Plutarch, Posner notes that “if this is plagiarism, we need more plagiarism.” He prefers to call it “creative imitation.” In this category he adds portions of Tristram Shandy and, closer to our day, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Eliot it was, in his The Sacred Wood, who wrote that “immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” 

As “unrepentant plagiarists,” Roger Kreuz cites Susan Sontag and Bob Dylan. Both, in their different ways, claimed that such appropriations of the words of others—Sontag in her fourth novel, In America, Dylan in his various songs—made possible,à laShakespeare on Plutarch, improvements upon the originals. Dylan’s response to his accusers was “All those evil m——f——s can rot in hell.” Ms. Sontag, more measured (it would be hard not to be), held that on this matter of appropriating other works for one’s own, “there’s a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions.” She has a point. As style is the man (or woman), as Buffon had it, so for the literary, reading is coterminous with actual experience. 

Posner notes, rightly, that creativity is not the same as originality. One can be the former without being the latter. Looking back upon my own decades of writings, I find little original in them. I believe I have acquired a style, or “voice,” as it is often called in academic writing programs. I choose my own words, I deploy them in sentences of my own fashioning, I have my own point of view. But I have set out no new ideas. Many of the ideas I have acquired derive from my reading of those essayists I admire, among them Michel de Montaigne, Matthew Arnold, Max Beerbohm, George Orwell, Michael Oakeshott. I hope that their influence, if not of course their words, turns up in my own essays. Does the influence of other writers, writers better than oneself, constitute yet another form of plagiarism? If so, then perhaps almost all writing is essentially plagiarism. In which case, I say, don’t evade your eyes, just plagiarize. As Tom Lehrer put it.