Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound’s Poetic Renewal

Recent work in psychology has postulated a role for imitation in such diverse aspects of cognition and human development as self-recognition, acquisition of linguistic and moral systems, and even Theory of Mind—or how we learn that other people have minds that work similarly to our own. Current theories of cultural evolution in anthropology are based largely upon imitation.¹ While there are still active arguments on the exact role of imitation and the extent of its influence on human development—much of them depending on how broadly the term is defined—it is becoming increasingly clear that imitation is a fundamental aspect of the human mind and therefore influences the products of that mind, including literature (in the broad sense of any linguistic, structured artifact) and the other arts.

This conclusion should be of great moment to the study of any sort of artistic work, not only because, for instance, literature is a product of the human mind and therefore must be influenced by the way it functions (while not being strictly reducible to it), but also because of the millennia-long history of the study of imitation and the arts, including mimesis in Plato and Aristotle; Seneca’s, Horace’s, Cicero’s and especially Quintilian’s theories of imitation; and the Renaissance practice of imitatio, or heuristic imitation of literary models. Work on imitation emerging from psychology and anthropology allows us to bridge these rhetorical and cognitive approaches and to see imitation in an even broader light—as not just a means of composition, although it certainly is, but more fundamentally as an inherent aspect of all literary/cultural production that emerges out of an innate mental faculty (or collection of them).

Encompassing a broad range of disciplines and potentially large swathes of cultural history, a full study of literary imitation from an evolutionary/cognitive perspective is far too great an undertaking for the scope of a single work. It is thus useful either to focus on a particular use of imitation as expressed across multiple authors and cultural contexts or to expand the methodology to broader aspects of imitation, but concentrate on the work of a single author. Here I have chosen the second path, focusing on the poetry of Ezra Pound. Pound’s work makes for a productive place to study imitation for two primary reasons. First of all, poetry, as formed language, supplies more concrete examples for examining in detail the transformations and alterations inherent in imitation and consequently the uses to which it is put. Lines can be counted, syllables and stresses tallied, rhyme schemes compared, and word usages weighed. While prosaic forms can be imported and borrowed readily, it is more difficult to speak of the “imitation” of a novel or short story in a detailed, concrete, and extended manner; there is a scope beyond which the tools I wish to put into use here are too finely focused. At the very least, lyric provides a more immediately productive place to develop this new methodology.

The second reason is that imitation, both broadly and narrowly conceived, is central to Pound’s poetry, and his work covers many aspects of literary imitation from translation to mimicry to emulation to adaptation and all the shades of gray in between. Imitation broadly conceived in Pound’s work, as in any poet’s, forms a spectrum. The furthest extreme of fidelity, obviously, is pure copying (although even copying can lead to mistakes and changes). Moving along the spectrum we have translation in the literal sense of “carrying over” denotative meaning from one language to another. This blends into mimicry, which aims to reproduce primarily the external and formal aspects of a work. In the center is imitation in the narrow sense, which revives a source text at the same time that it remains an autonomous work in its own right; it shows more transformation and originality than does translation or mimicry but is textually closer to its source than are our next modes. Next comes emulation, or the attempt to create the same literary effect through different linguistic or formal means. Getting...