1. What plagiarism?

The sources of the accusation of plagiarism are the two following articles:

• Evans, Robert: “5 Great Men Who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism”, Cracked.com, 29.03.2009.
• Bailey, Jonathan: “Famous Plagiarists: Could it Happen Today?”, PlagiarismToday, 31.05.2009.

I did not find any accusation of plagiarism in the 17 reviews, contemporary reactions and interpretations from the years 1922 - 1945 included in the Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land, edited by Michael North (Norton, 2001).

Since Bailey appears to agree with Evans's accusation against T. S. Eliot, let us first look at what he considers the "generally accepted definition of plagiarism" (i.e.from Dictionary.reference.com) and then see whether the accusations by Evans and Bailey hold water:

The unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.

The remainder of this essay discusses whether and to what extent this definition applies to the quotes and allusions in The Waste Land.

2. Cawein as unacknowledged source of inspriation

Evans first claims that "the idea behind The Waste Land (...) was plagiarized from an almost unknown American poet named Madison Cawein". Eliot's source was supposedly Cawein's poem "Waste Land". ("Waste Land" can be read online.)

Evans also claims that

a fair amount of its content [i.e. of The Waste Land], was plagiarized from (...) Madison Cawein.

Cawein's poem is exactly 40 lines long, whereas The Waste Land is 433 lines long, so it is not clear how most of the content of The Waste Land could have been plagiarised from "Waste Land".

Evans then goes on to say that Cawein's "Waste Land"

contains several metaphors that were later used word for word by Eliot in his The Waste Land.

Evans doesn't bother to tell us what those images or words are, but we can consult Richard F. Patteson's short article "An Additional Source for “The Waste Land”" in Notes and Queries (July 1976), which is Evans's unnamed source. (Since Evans doesn't acknowledge Patteson but presents the "plagiarism" as his own discovery, his article can be seen as an example of plagiarism according to the definition cited by Bailey, because that definition does not only cover "language" but also "thoughts".)

Patteson says about "Waste Land" that "[m]uch of the poem's imagery also suggest's Eliot's":

• "Cawein's setting is dry and dead."

• Eliot's "cicada / And dry grass singing" is forecast by Cawein's "cricket's cry and the locusts' whirr".

• More revealing (...) is Cawein's explicit equation of "the grim death there" with "forms of the mind, an old despair, / That there into semblance grew / Out of the grief I knew".

Patteson then mentions "the grief that lay behind T. S. Eliot's own work". However, he also admits that "the use of nature to express an emotional or spiritual condition does not originate either with Eliot or with Madison Cawein." Patteson concludes that Eliot must have read Cawein's poem but does not accuse him of plagiarism.

Patteson's findings definitely don't constitute "a fair amount" (see Evans's claim above). The theme of drought and the "waste land" (or devastated land) goes at least as far back as the Grail legend (see Perceval ou le Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, 12th century), which is also cited in one of Eliot's other sources, Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge University Press, 1920). Using nature or weather phenomena to express an emotional state is known by the literary term pathetic fallacy. With regard to Patteson's last point: whereas Cawein uses the cited imagery to express the narrator's (and not necessarily the author's) grief, one cannot say that Eliot uses this imagery to express his personal grief, even if that provided (part of?) the initial impetus for the composition of The Waste Land. First, The Waste Land does not have a sole narrator but changes perspectives many times; unlike Cawein's poem, it works as a collage of viewpoints and fragments. Second, what inspires a poet to compose a poem and the poem's meaning are not the same thing, even if they are related. Moreover, T. S. Eliot wrote in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that poetry is not the expression of personality:

The process of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

(...) the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

(Quoted from The Waste Land and Other Writings. Introduction by Mary Karr. New York: The Modern Library, 2001, pages 103 and 105-106, respectively.)

Eliot's view of poetry is relevant here in the sense that he uses images, whether borrowed or original, in a different way than Cawein or many of his other predecessors; it explains in part why Eliot would never write a line like "Out of the grief I knew", or at least not in a way that allows identification between himself and the poem's narrator.

Cawein's "Waste Land" was an unacknowledged source of inspiration for The Waste Land, but Evans's accusation of plagiarism is an exaggeration. Evans conveniently ignores the note in which Eliot explained that Weston's book was a source of inspiration and that the drought theme goes back to Medieval Grail stories, presumably to avoid weakening his accusation of theft.

3. Other sources for "The Waste Land"

What are the other authors that Eliot supposedly "plagiarised"? Evans's second example is the beginning of Part II, which uses a modified quote from Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra (Act II, scene 2). Evans conveniently ignores that Eliot's note explicitly mentions this source and that the type of reader Eliot had in mind was expected to recognise the lines. His third and final example is the line "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song" (the fourth line in Part III) comes from Edmund Spenser's poem "Prothalamion". Here, again, Evans ignores that Eliot's own notes identify this source.

Evans concludes that

[m]ost of "The Waste Land" was just cobbled together out of quotes from other writers

and that T. S. Eliot was "a plagiarizing cockbag".

In other words, Evans is claiming that Eliot was trying to pass off other people's work as his own. This claim ignores several aspects of Eliot's work.

1. Whenever Eliot inserts a quote (whether modified or not) into The Waste Land, there is a change in metre, register, line length, language or a combination of these. Even a relatively unexperienced reader of poetry should be able to notice these changes. In other words, readers were expected to notice changes in poetic style.
2. Eliot had a type of educated reader in mind who would be able to recognise a large proportion of the quotes and allusions. To take two obvious examples, readers should recognise the Shakespeare quotes in "Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies" (Ophelia in Hamlet) and "Those are pearls that were his eyes" (The Tempest). And the Marvell allusion in "But at my back from time to time I hear" ("To His Coy Mistress). Readers were also expected to recognise the Dante allusion in "so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many", as Eliot explained "What Dante Means to Me" (published in his book To Criticize the Critic, 1965). Admittedly, Eliot's notes are not always helpful, for example, because they don't always mantion line numbers or because they cite sources in Latin or Dante's Tuscan dialect without translation. Even in spite of the notes, the poem is not very accessible. In New Bearings on English Poetry (1932), F. R. Leavis wrote about this, "But that the public for it is limited is one of the symptoms of the state of culture that produced the poem."
3. According to Helen Gardner (in an essay in Eliot in His Time, 1973) Eliot even "wished to go through English poetic styles as Joyce had gone through English prose styles the section called "Oxen of the Sun" [in Ulysses]. However, according to Gardner, Eliot was not a good enough parodist to disguise his own style, so Pound advised against that idea. This is relevant to the accusation of plagiarism because this plan required quoting and allusions.
4. As Gorham Munson pointed out in his review in The Manchester Guardian of 31 October 1923, "the central process of the poem (...) is to take ancient beauty by the neck and twist it into modern ugliness." John Crowe Ransom wrote in The New York Evening Post Literary Review (14 July 1923) that Eliot used a device "not fundamentally different from parody. To parody is to borrow a phrase whose meaning lies on a plane of intelligence and to insert it into the context of a lower plane; an attempt to compound two incommensurable imaginative creations." If parody is The Waste Land's central process, large-scale quoting and alluding is simply unavoidable.

The conclusion from the above points is that Eliot's use of quotes and allusions is part of a plan, and that this plan is made obvious both through literary means (points 1 and 2 above) and by means of the notes. Bailey, who claims to be a poet, does not mention any of the artistic considerations of using quotes and allusions in his accusation of plagiarism. Evans's claim that "[m]ost of "The Waste Land" was just cobbled together out of quotes from other writers" simply betrays ignorance of literary techniques.

4. The meaning of "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal"

Finally, there is the infamous quote "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal", which Bailey interprets as Eliot "bragging about his rampant copying". Both Evans and Bailey take this quote out of context and present it as Eliot describing his own method. The quote actually comes from Eliot's essay "Philip Massinger", published in The Sacred Wood (1920, i.e. before the composition of The Waste Land). Philip Massinger (1583 - 1640) was a younger contemporary of Shakespeare (1564 - 1616). Eliot's essay reviews a book by a certain Mr. A. H. Cruickshank that (among other things) presents "parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare to make manifes Massinger's indebtedness." It is in this context that Eliot writes the following (emphasis mine):

One of the surest of tests [of indebtedness] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling that is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which as no cohesion. (...) Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne.

Poets always inherit from a tradition, as Eliot wrote earlier in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919). When Elizabethan dramatists "borrowed" from their contemporaries (or from Antiquity), they did not simply rip unacknowledged quotes from another poet's work; what Eliot says is that they borrowed images or ideas and tried to turn them into something that was in their own voice. Hence, the words "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal" is not about plagiarism perpetrated by Elizabethan dramatists, but about a normal process of artistic influence. (Ironically, since the first impression of The Waste Land is often a lack of cohesion, the above quote could be misread as saying that Eliot calls himself a bad poet.)

Below is one of the parallel quotations that illustrate the idea "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal":

Shakespeare (Othello, Act III, scene 3):

Not poppy, nor mandragora
Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world
Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.

Massinger (The Emperor of the East):

Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids
That bow unto my sceptre? or restore
My mind to that tranquility and peace
Is then enjoyed?

If we follow Evans's and Bailey's interpretation of "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal" is a defence of plagiarism, then the above Massinger quote either imitated or plagiarised the preceding Shakespeare quote. Eliot writes,

This is, on Massinger's part, an echo rather than an imitation or a plagiarism - the basest, because least conscious form of borrowing.

Eliot knew very well the difference between a literary echo, imitation and plagiarism. What he did in The Waste Land relied on an artistic process that was new and that challenged the boundary between quotes and allusions on the one hand and plagiarism on the other. When Bailey writes in his essay that it is "very unlikely" that Eliot would be able to do the same thing today, he is ignoring this artistic process and putting it on the same level as one non-fiction author copying language from another author without proper citations or acknowledgement. Coming from someone who claims to be a poet, this is simply baffling.