Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad

 The poet and playwright William Shakespeare is often rumored to have stolen ideas, lines, and other material from his rival dramatists. It is known that he collaborated with fellow members of his theatrical company on the writing of some plays, although how many and to what extent is still a topic of scholarly debate. Most of his plots were freely adapted from existing stories, though he radically transformed many of them and gave them a philosophical and psychological depth not previously seen in English literature. 
 For all these reasons, Shakespeare takes flak from some camps for being a fraud. (He wasn’t – he was a vastly talented and original writer, as even his contemporaries recognized. But to a limited extent the charge of “plagiarism” sticks. “Good artists copy, great artists steal…”)
Beasts Bounding Through Time