An interesting article from The Smart Set describing two very different ideas of what makes a genius (via: 3quarksdaily):

On the neoclassical side of the ring, we’ve got Voltaire and Kant, who defined genius as “only judicious imitation” (that was Voltaire). This means that genius is deliberate and that ideas come from somewhere, rather than from nowhere. When Sand walks into the room and calls Chopin’s playing “imitative harmony,” she’s representing the neoclassical position. “His composition of this evening was indeed full of the drops of rain which resounded on the sonorous tiles of the monastery.” Sand implies that Chopin can hear something extraordinary in the drops of rain that most people can’t hear. His genius is that he can imitate these raindrops and make them his own. (It also implies that he is working in the tradition of other great, rain-loving composers.)

The romantics, on the other hand, replaced judgment and grace with imagination and originality: “The power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination,” in the words of Coleridge. Notice that, genuine romantic that she is at heart, Sand backtracks when Chopin himself protests against the suggestion that he’s just monkeying the sound of the rain. She says, “His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature, translated by sublime equivalents into his musical thought, and not by a servile repetition of external sounds.” Both writer and composer agree it is Chopin’s wild reverie (or hallucination) that actually birthed the composition he was playing. Chopin was not just tinkling around to the sound of the rain; he had been seized by the sublime.

If I had more time today I’d delve into this a little further but I am going to say, probably to no one’s surprise, that I agree with both. Genius is “judicious imitation” as well as imagination and originality. I couldn’t imagine it any other way. It’s also why I think, without any good evidence I’ll admit, that music is an important gateway to genius because it combines this judicious imitation (learning the structure of chords and scales) and imagination and originality. In other words, it requires one to be both Voltaire’s kind of genius and Chopin’s kind of genius in one.

I’ll also say, stirring the pot a little, that maybe that’s why a lot of geniuses were drunks…