Wiley, Margaret Lee. “GENIUS: A PROBLEM IN DEFINITION”. Studies in English 16 (1936): 77–83. Web.Genius is a problematic term to define not simply because there is dispute over the relative ease with which the word is paraded to refer to anything and anyone that stands against the grain, but also because the accumulation of various shades of meaning makes it difficult to extract something common from out of the linguistic mire.