<p>LLMs like ChatGPT are rapidly altering writing practice, within academia but also in the professions. Among the most significant of these morphologies in composition will be the increase of assemblage and adjacent strategies whereby writers will compose with already existing text as much as or more than they invent from a blank page. The present exploratory essay considers the literary history of these practices, finding that while newly employed on a wider scale, such strategies have their origins in the literary-aesthetic milieux of modernism in the early twentieth century. The article traces the development of this approach to writing (which is referred to as Writing with Writing [WwW]) to a larger sensibility, itself influenced by material, cultural, and political regimes connected with modernity—a sensibility entailing as well new models of authorship that are only now becoming radically exigent. This paper examines the work of some of WwW’s most important early practitioners, like the modernist poets and collaborators, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, with an eye toward how these authors wrote with writing in revolutionary ways but even more, how, in so doing, they fashioned new ways of understanding agency, originality, and wholeness. Finally, the essay aims to consider in what ways this literary history might impact our understanding of the current revolution in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) and how it might help us to conceive viable pathways for our uncertain future. Briefly put, the argument put forth here sees the age of AI as a problematic of harmony for which the models of modernism offer productive frameworks for charting a fruitful course forward.</p>