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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/03/19, SPi
IMITATING AUTHORS
IMITATING
AUTHORS
P l ato to F u t u r i t y
COLI N BU R ROW
1
1
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© Colin Burrow 2019
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First Edition published in 2019
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In memoriam J. A. Burrow, 1932–2017

With apologies that it was too late.
Preface
O ne of the great pleasures in writing this book has been that so many
people whom I met while I was at work on it had something to say
about the broad subject of imitation. Experimental psychologists, psycholo-
gists, comedians, anthropologists, experts in copyright law, biologists, classi-
cists, art historians, poets, musicians, painters, philosophers would all say ‘ah
yes, that reminds me of . . .’. Even people without much to say about the
topic in the abstract could put on a decent imitation of a colleague or a
political figure. I am sorry that I have not been able to explore all the
avenues which were suggested to me, or to acknowledge here everyone
with whom I had a conversation which has borne fruit in this book. It ori-
ginated as the Bristol Blackwell Lectures on Greece, Rome, and the Classical
Tradition. At Bristol I had a wonderfully responsive and thoughtful audi-
ence, and comments from Charles Martindale, David Hopkins, Danny
Karlin, Bob Fowler, Ellen O’Gorman, Ad Putter, as well as some bracing
and thought-provoking responses from Duncan Kennedy, Paul Hammond,
and others, have invisibly or visibly sustained and boosted the argument.
Since then I have incurred additional debts to seminar audiences at
Princeton, St Andrews, Cambridge, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. A version of
Chapter 8 was delivered at the Canada Milton Seminar, and I am particu-
larly grateful to my hosts at Toronto, Paul Stevens and Lynne Magnusson.
Adam Phillips gave excellent advice on reading in the psychoanalytic
tradition without suggesting that I needed my head examined.Tom Keymer
gave some valuable leads on literary property. Members of the Montaigne
reading group at Oxford (including Richard Scholar, Wes Williams, Neil
Kenny, John O’Brien, Katie Murphy, Ian Maclean, Rowan Tomlinson, and
Terence Cave—to whose work I am particularly indebted, and who, if any-
one, is the exemplum to which this book fails to live up) have in various ways
informed its thinking, not least by convincing me that other people were
better qualified than I to consider this topic in relation to France. Sheldon
viii Pr e face
Brammall gave valuable pointers on translation theory. A conversation a

long time ago with Alessandro Barchiesi about eidōla in Euripides was par-
ticularly fruitful, as were several more recent ones with Michael Hetherington
and Micha Lazarus about early modern poetics. I have benefited greatly
from both the published work of and conversations with Kathy Eden, in
whose footsteps I tread at several points non passibus aequis. Stephen Harrison
cast expert eyes over Chapter 3, and Martin McLaughlin offered very help-
ful advice on Chapter 4. Philip Hardie made valuable suggestions on an
early draft. Early versions of the Milton chapter were kindly read by Nigel
Smith and Stephen Greenblatt. Cecilia Heyes offered invaluable guidance
on experimental psychology. Clare Bucknell provided very helpful feed-
back on later chapters. Charles Martindale and David Hopkins heroically
read a near final version of the whole, and I am grateful to them for their
extensive and searching comments. John Kerrigan has been the ideal reader,
and has enabled me to unpick evasions and elisions of thought from nearly
every page. Where such evasions and elisions remain, of course, they are the
consequences of my own stubbornness or ignorance. Two anonymous
readers for OUP provided reports which were themselves an education, and
Jacqueline Norton at OUP has helped the project into print with a level of
care and enthusiasm that is every author’s dream. Library staff at the Bodleian,
the Cambridge University Library, and in particular Gaye Morgan, Norma
Aubertin-Potter, Catherine Mower, and Gabrielle Matthews at the Codrington
Library at All Souls have been unfailingly helpful, even with my most tire-
some requests. I could not have undertaken a book of such wide scope or
developed the argument in such detail without the benefit of a Senior
Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and I am profoundly
grateful to the Warden and Fellows of the College for their support and
wide-ranging conversations.
Contents
Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts xi
Introduction1
I. A N TIQU IT Y
1. From Mime ̄sis to Imitatio: Before and After Plato 37
2. Building Bodies: Imitatio and the Roman Rhetorical Tradition 71
3. Dreamitation: Lucretius, Homer, Virgil 106
II. E A R LY MODE R N IT Y
4. Petrarchan Transformations 139
5. Adaptive Imitation: Ciceronians, Courtiers, and Quixotes 169
6. Formal Imitation: The ‘Leaden-Headed Germans’ and Their
English Heirs 206
7. Ben Jonson: Formal Imitation 235
III. M I LTON A N D A F T E R
8. Milton: Modelling the Ancients 281
9. Imitation in the Age of Literary Property: Pope to Wordsworth 335
10. The Promethean Moment: Mary Shelley and Milton’s
Monstrous Progeny374
Posthuman Postscript: Poems more Durable than Brass 407
Bibliography 427
Index 459
Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts
In quotations from early modern sources other than Spenser i/j and u/v are
modernized. Quotations from modernized editions are used where they are
available and modernization makes no substantive difference. For ease of
reference quotations from classical texts are usually keyed to the relevant
volumes in the Loeb Classical Library, although I have sometimes modified
the texts where they include emendations which were not available to early
readers, and have where appropriate used alternative editions. Translations
from Latin and Greek are generally from the Loeb editions, although I have
frequently modified those translations where they obscure a crucial sense,
and have indicated occasions on which other translations have been followed.
The following abbreviations have been used:
Aen. Virgil, Aeneid

CPW John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols.
(New Haven, 1953–82)
DRN Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
FQ Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, H. Yamashita,
and T. Suzuki (Harlow, 2001)
Fam. Francesco Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri,
trans. A. S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (Baltimore and London, 1975–85)
GL Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti
(Torino, 1980)
Institutio Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria
Met. Ovid, Metamorphoses
OED The Oxford English Dictionary Online
OLD The Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. Glare (Oxford, 1968)
PL John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn (London, 1998)
PR John Milton, Paradise Regained, in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John
Carey, 2nd edn (London, 1997)
Introduction
‘I f a man should prosecute as much as could be said of everything, his

work would find no end.’1 So said Ben Jonson when he discussed imi-
tation and learning in his Discoveries. This book is about imitation, but it
does not seek to say as much as could be said about everything. So it is not
about how authors have imitated reality, but the (slightly) more bounded
subject of the ways in which authors imitate each other.
The reason this topic matters is that every language user is in some sense
an imitator, although in different periods people have imitated in different
ways and have thought differently about how it should be done. The core
question which underlies the book is simple to state but more or less
impossible to answer: how do human beings learn sophisticated usage of
language from others, and yet end up sounding like themselves (or believing
that they do)? Answers to this question vary through time and space, and
I explore them chiefly in relation to the period and place in which imitation
was unarguably central to literary practice—Britain and Europe in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries—but Imitating Authors as a whole aims to
show why this topic and its longer history matter today.
Contemporary Westerners stand at the receiving end of a very long, and
in many respects very confused, history of thinking about how speakers and
writers imitate each other. Throughout the ages poets, dramatists, and nov-
elists have (largely) benefited from that confusion. As I suggest in the final
chapter, that history has stayed with us, and its after-effects are visible in
surprising places. It shapes many of the ways in which literary influence is
thought about today, but it also colours the language we habitually use to
think and write about other kinds of replication with a difference, from the
1. Ben Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David M. Bevington, Martin
Butler, and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 2012), 7.561.
2 I m i tat i ng Au t hors
way in which clones are represented in popular fiction, through arguments

about artificial intelligence and other attempts to imitate human language-use
by artificial and mechanical means.
Today being an imitator is generally regarded as less good than being
whatever else it is that we are supposed to be—‘original’ or ‘ourselves’ or
‘creative’ or ‘whacky’ or ‘unusual’ or ‘generative’ or ‘productive’ or ‘inspir-
ing’. This book offers a partial genealogy of present attitudes in order to
give some reasons why we have ended up being so uneasy about imita-
tion. It also sets out a view of the topic that puts it close to the heart of
what it is to be a language user and a human being. The book is in part
a defence of imitation as a practice that enables people to learn from each
other and to write. Imitating Authors discusses both authors who imitate
other authors and the theory of this activity. To distinguish this practice
from other forms of imitation I generally, unless the context is clear, use
its Latin name of imitatio. I chiefly consider this strange and various process
in relation to the reception of the classical tradition, broadly considered,
and epic poetry is a recurrent though by no means exclusive focus of
my attention.
Imitating Authors is partly a work of intellectual history, which unpicks
how different people and periods have thought about and practised imitatio.
But it does not offer a simple analysis of what imitation could and did mean
in different periods. Rather I aim to show that the power and influence of
this concept derives from two key features. It has wide human significance,
since from infancy all human beings learn by imitating, and, in different
ways in different spheres of activity, we continue to do so until we die. It also
is an inherently complex concept, which is associated with a vocabulary of
wide and frequently unstable sense. Its tendency to mutate into other kinds
of activity is part of what makes it significant. An imitation of a parent by a
child can be seen as part of a process of learning. But an imitation by an
adult of another adult can be an act of homage or it can be an act of rivalry,
or it can be a parodic tribute or a satirical attack, or it can be several of these
things at once. And, as any parent knows, children can also sometimes mock
or play with those whose solemn actions they imitate.
When one author imitates another there is a similar range of possibilities,
to which others are added. Imitating authors are also readers, who are
observing features of the texts they read, which are passed on through their
texts to their own readers. So imitatio can blend outwards into the history of
I n t roduct ion3
reading.2 Since writers have often imitated authors in different languages

from the one in which they are writing, imitatio can often become barely
distinguishable from other practices such as paraphrase or translation. And
since writers can either consciously or unconsciously signal the fact that
they are imitating another author or text, imitatio can often be marked by
allusions or verbal echoes, which might shade off into faint intertextual
minglings, or generate texts which are tesserae of other texts. It has as its
rebellious doubles acts of parody, forgery, and mimicry. All of those diffusive
fringes of the act of imitating make it at once powerful and complex, and its
complexity is often the main source of its power.
By the same token imitatio is not easy to pin down. Indeed attempting to
pin it down too firmly can take some of the life out of it, since the elasticity
of the concept is part of its appeal to authors and to critics alike. But there
are ways in which the core of the topic can be distinguished from its periph-
ery, even if there are no firm boundaries between its centre and edges. The
act of imitating an earlier author entails constructing an imagined view of
what is distinctive about that author. That could take a relatively systematic
form, and entail extracting from a body of prior writing a set of attributes
which the imitator believes are common features of those texts—a certain
kind of subject-matter, perhaps, or favoured words and a preference for
particular rhetorical or poetic forms, or even a particular way of presenting
a text on the page. Each author might believe that different aspects of a
given body of texts are what make it a distinctive object of imitation, and
each age might encourage a different view of past writing. The imitation of
authors therefore raises questions about how different readers analyse and
remember the texts that they read, about how shared practices of writing
and interpretation grow and mutate, and about how different writers in
different periods have had different concepts not just of what authorship is,
but of what the central characteristics of individual authors might be.3 That
historically transformative aspect of imitation is a further reason why the
2. On reading, see, inter alia, James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and
Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996), Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material
in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), William H. Sherman,
Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, 2008), and Stephen Orgel, The
Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford, 2015).
3. On the history and theory of authorship, the classic though much contested essay is ‘What is an
Author?’ in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,
trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 113–38.
subject is so rich. It is an agent of historical change and transformation

which itself keeps on changing.
The rich fusion of concepts which gather around imitatio has made it
central to literary activity—as well as close to the centre of educational
relationships between human beings, between cultures, and between
generations—for millennia. This conceptual richness begins very early
indeed: as Chapter 1 suggests, it had started well before Plato attacked the
fictional arts for merely imitating the world as it is perceived rather than the
forms which underlie those perceptions. But, as Chapter 1 also argues,
Plato’s critique of literary mimēsis gave a powerful negative charge to many
subsequent discussions of how authors imitate each other. If an artist is
inferior as a result of imitating an imitation of a Platonic Form, how much
more inferior must an artist be who imitates another artist?
Imitatio was given a particular vitality by writers in the rhetorical t radition,
for whom it was a central element in the way in which the art of rhetoric
was taught and acquired. The rhetoricians, however, did not simply provide
a clear theory of imitation which poets could follow. As Chapter 2 shows,
writers on rhetoric regarded imitation as one of the main ways in which a
young orator learnt to become a skilled practitioner, but they tended to
offer a series of suggestive but conceptually fuzzy definitions of what
imitatio actually entailed.
This was not just because it is extremely hard to describe in the abstract
how one person successfully imitates another in order to learn from them.
Roman writers about rhetoric also wished to preserve the myth that the
final stages of a rhetorical education were dependent on personal contact
and an imitative relationship between a pupil and an expert speaker. It was
the skill of an expert exemplar, manifested in practice rather than codifiable
in the form of rules, which the young orator was supposed to acquire by
imitating. Learning from an example of this kind went beyond the process
of learning rules from a grammaticus or a teacher of rhetoric. It meant learning
a practice, a habit of speaking that enabled the young orator to speak on any
occasion. That necessarily made imitatio mysterious: it was the process by
which an art became second nature, and by which the indefinable and
practical skill of an earlier practitioner transmitted itself to a pupil.
Latin was not as well equipped with technical and abstract vocabulary as
the Greek sources on which Roman rhetoricians (themselves imitators)
chiefly drew. This is evident in one key sentence from Quintilian’s Institutes
of Oratory to which I return more than once, since it is both crucial and
I n t roduct ion5
obscure. At the very start of Book 10, which includes a discussion of reading
and of imitatio, Quintilian declares that mastering the art of rhetoric requires
more than simply grasping a set of rules. It requires the rhetorician to
acquire the kind of habituated practical skill which Aristotle described as a
hexis. Here Quintilian (as he often does when he encounters a term of art)
has to drop into Greek:
But these rules of style, while part of the student’s theoretical knowledge, are
not in themselves sufficient to give him oratorical power (vim). In addition he
will require that assured facility which the Greeks call hexis.
Sed haec eloquendi praecepta, sicut cogitationi sunt necessaria, ita non satis
ad vim dicendi valent, nisi illis firma quaedam facilitas, quae apud Graecos ἔξιϛ
nomitatur, accesserit. (Institutio, 10.1.1)
The Latin word habitus might have provided Quintilian with a rough
equivalent for the Greek hexis, but it does not quite cover the full range of
senses implied by the Greek word, or, indeed, convey the mystique which
Quintilian elicits by using the Greek term. The successful imitator does not
simply learn rules or vocabulary from his master, but acquires through
imitation the ability to speak with an instinctive appropriateness.4 This arises
from practice (in the sense of exercise and rehearsal) and in turn enables
practice (in the sense of an ability to do). That is a crude paraphrase of what
Quintilian probably meant when he used the Greek work hexis in this
passage. And it is a hexis that an imitator acquires from the imitated exem-
plum (which is the word Roman writers tend to use for the imitated text: it
is preferable to the word ‘model’, by which it now often translated, because,
as I show in Chapter 8, ‘model’ has its own distinctive and potentially dis-
tracting history).
Because Roman authors struggled to find abstract terminology to
describe ‘learning to be like and acquiring a similar skill to’ a predecessor,
their discussions of imitatio relied heavily on metaphors. Quintilian suggests
that learning to become a practitioner is a matter of acquiring bodily force
4. On Aristotle’s conception of hexis as ‘an entrenched psychic condition or state which develops
through experience rather than congenitally’, see Thornton C. Lockwood, ‘Habituation, Habit,
and Character in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics’, in Tom Sparrow and Adam Hutchinson, eds., A
History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu (Plymouth, 2013), 19–36, p. 23, and on the role of habitu-
ation in Aristotle, see M. F. Burnyeat, ‘Aristotle on Learning to be Good’, in Amélie Oksenberg
Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Los Angeles, 1980), 69–92. Nicomachean Ethics, 1140a–b, states
that ‘architectural skill, for instance, is an art, and it is also a rational quality [hexis] concerned with
making’, and defines practical wisdom as a ‘truth-attaining rational quality [hexis], concerned
with action in relation to things that are good and bad for human beings’. Translations from
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (London and New York, 1926).
(vis); he compares the skill of the imitator implicitly and explicitly to

processes of biological replication; and he and other Roman writers—
including, most influentially, Seneca in his 84th Epistle—urge readers to
‘digest’ their reading, and produce from it a new text which resembles the
exemplum as a child resembles its parent. A rich store of metaphors—following
the path of earlier authors rather than treading slavishly in their footsteps,
gathering nectar like a bee and combining many savours into one, and
sometimes necromantic metaphors of rebirth and revival—emerges from
discussions of imitation in the Roman rhetorical tradition.
That storehouse was supplemented by further metaphors which imitating
authors used to describe their relationships to their predecessors. In what is
probably the most influential lost passage of writing from antiquity, the
Roman epic poet Ennius suggested that he was a reincarnation of Homer.
Later poets and critics were to use the idea of metempsychosis to describe
genealogical relationships between authors. Francis Meres famously said in
1598 that ‘as the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the
sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare’,5
and Dryden declared that Spenser ‘more than once insinuates that the Soul
of Chaucer was transfus’d into his Body; and that he was begotten by him
Two hundred years after his Decease’.6 Other metaphors for imitatio might
evoke the conflict that can be implied by the Greek word zēlōsis, which can
mean both ‘imitation’, ‘zealous affection’, and ‘rivalrous emulation’: an imi-
tator might seek to outrun an earlier writer, or master not just an art but
also an earlier master or an earlier culture. That is one reason why the suc-
cessful imitator could sometimes be represented as not just an independent
being who had internalized earlier writing, but as a free and independent
citizen, a ‘master’ himself. That could in turn give (as I argue particularly in
Chapter 6) political overtones to successful performances of imitatio.
Discussions of imitatio in the rhetorical tradition consequently combined
conceptual obscurity with metaphorical vividness.The gap between abstract
commands (‘learn a hexis from your exemplum’) and metaphorical injunc-
tions (‘resemble your original as a child does a father rather than as a picture
5. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), fol. 281v.

6. John Dryden, The Works, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, and Vinton A. Dearing,
20 vols. (Berkeley, 1956–2000), 7.25. See Stuart Gillespie, ‘Literary Afterlives: Metempsychosis
from Ennius to Jorge Luis Borges’, in Philip Hardie and Helen Moore, eds., Classical Literary
Careers and Their Reception (Cambridge, 2010), 209–25, and for Spenser’s relationship to Chaucer,
see Jeff Espie, ‘Literary Paternity and Narrative Revival: Chaucer’s Soul(s) from Spenser to
Dryden’, Modern Philology 114 (2016), 39–58.
I n t roduct ion7
resembles a sitter’, ‘digest your reading into your own substance’, ‘become a
reincarnation of Chaucer’,‘become free of your masters’) was an immensely
fertile space, in which both conceptual argument and poetic exploration
could grow.
The combination of mystique and metaphor with which imitatio was
presented in the rhetorical tradition had three major consequences. Firstly,
writing on imitation in that tradition had what might appear today to be a
surprising tendency to stress the inimitable talent or ingenium of the text or
person imitated. The power or the force or the talent of Cicero were sup-
posedly the ultimate objects of imitation, but those qualities Quintilian
himself confessed were not imitable because they were innate (Institutio,
10.2.12). This, in later centuries, fed into the notion that great writers have
an indefinable genius that was intrinsically beyond imitation.
Secondly and relatedly, strange things happened when the vocabulary
developed in the rhetorical tradition to describe the imitation by a pupil of
an exemplary practitioner migrated into the fields of poetry and poetics.
A language rooted in personal contact between pupil and master was trans-
ferred to a relationship between a reader and a writer or writers who might
be dead, or, indeed, belong to a distant historical period or an entirely
different culture. This transfer was already occurring within the rhetorical
tradition: Quintilian presents Cicero as the principal object for imitation,
although Cicero himself was long dead by the time Quintilian wrote in the
first century ad. It had long-term effects of immense significance. Rhetorical
writing about imitatio encouraged writers to think about the texts they
imitated as exemplary in the way that a personal instructor is exemplary; but
although texts were in this respect regarded as akin to people, they were
people who were only present through their textual traces or through
memory, and whose practice had to be retro-engineered from their surviving
writings. This meant that a poetics of renaissance and retrieval was already
implicit within the tradition of classical writing on rhetoric.
The third major consequence of the way imitatio was discussed in the
rhetorical tradition was that the comparisons and metaphors used to describe
imitation became a vital part of both the theory and also the practice of
imitatio. The living assimilation of one’s reading—digesting it, or resembling
it as a child resembles a parent, or seeking to reincarnate an earlier author—was
frequently opposed to painting a mere copy of an original, or, in Quintilian’s
extremely influential terminology, creating a mere simulacrum, a superficial
likeness, of an earlier text or author.
This metaphorical opposition—which connects the start of this history

to its conclusion in the world of clones and replicants—became common
because it provided a vivid means of marking a distinction which is more or
less impossible to make in any other way. It is extremely difficult to differ-
entiate in principle rather than in practice between a text which imitates a
previous work competently (whose author appears to have mastered a literary
system, and has learnt a practice from an earlier writer), and one which
replicates the features of an earlier text but which does not display the same
competence as the imitated text.
The opposition between ‘living’ revival and simulacral replication, which,
as the first three chapters show, can be traced to literary and philosophical
arguments in the fifth century bc and on through Lucretius’s De Rerum
Natura and into Virgil’s Aeneid, ran through both the rhetorical and literary
traditions. Imitating authors repeatedly revive and revise these metaphors,
which often feed into the textures of imitative and allusive writing. They
continued to do so right through into the nineteenth century and beyond.
The spectral presences of Dante and other familiar compound ghosts that
haunt the footsteps of T. S. Eliot are late offshoots of this long tradition
(‘I caught the sudden look of some dead master | Whom I had known, for-
gotten, half recalled | Both one and many; in the brown baked features |
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost | Both intimate and unidentifiable’),
and the way that Dante himself follows the footprints of his maestro Virgil’s
spirit through the inferno is an influential earlier instance.7 The metaphors
used to describe imitatio have a depth and richness that explain their durability.
They allow or encourage authors to ask whether they are haunted by the
ghost of the past, whether they are culling words from an earlier text or
making honey with a new savour, and whether they are free, or are simply
following in the footsteps of Homer, or Virgil, or Milton.
They also encourage imitating authors (in ways which can go significantly
beyond the often aggressively masculine and highly patrilinear vocabulary
of the rhetorical tradition) to think of themselves as more than simply male
conquerors of an earlier body of material. The notion that an imitator
brought about a live rebirth of the past was to make the language of imita-
tion exceptionally fertile: it made a feminine ability to give birth a key
7. ‘Little Gidding’, 38–42. Quotations from T. S. Eliot, The Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim
McCue, 2 vols. (London, 2015). Ricks and McCue list as ‘spectrally present’ in these lines Dante,
Yeats, Swift, Arnaut Daniel, Milton, and Joyce, pp. 1012–13. See further Sarah Annes Brown,
A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion and the Uncanny (Manchester, 2012).
I n t roduct ion9
component in the conception of what an author should do.8 Imitators were

supposed to be able to bear new children from the writing of the past.
Milton’s Eve, as Chapter 8 shows, owes much of her power to this aspect of
imitatio, and she in turn played a part in enabling Mary Shelley (as I argue in
Chapter 10) to create a new version of imitated life in Frankenstein. The
opposition between a good imitation as a live birth on the one hand, and
an ineffective (and sometimes also a morally bad) imitation as a shadow or
simulacrum or image of an original on the other, was to become a constitu-
tive element of the poetics of the European Renaissance. The literature of
that period in turn had a deep and shaping impact on the imaginations and
the vocabularies of later writers.
The question ‘how do I bring about a living recreation of a past author?’
is one with many possible answers. In Chapters 5 and 6 I concentrate chiefly
on two main kinds of answer to that question which were proposed in the
debates about the nature of imitatio in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
One, which I have termed ‘adaptive imitation’, was that an author might
seek to adapt the vocabulary and conventions of ancient texts to new times
and customs. This had consequences for the ways in which writers in the
period thought about authorship. It encouraged the view that earlier texts
embodied transhistorical principles which could be adapted to new cir-
cumstances and new vocabularies. Cicero or Virgil consequently could be
thought of not as a specific body of texts or as a particular set of words, but
as a set of principles for composition which could be adapted to new
circumstances.
Imitating Cicero therefore did not simply mean reusing fragments of his
vocabulary, or regarding him as a finite corpus of texts to be replicated. The
aim of the imitating author was rather to treat Cicero as a subjunctive
principle, and to write ‘as Cicero would write’ in a new set of circumstances
and vocabularies. That mode of adaptive imitation later developed into one
in which, in the words of Samuel Johnson, ‘the ancients are familiarised by
adapting their sentiments to modern topicks, by making Horace say of
Shakespeare what he originally said of Ennius’.9 Chapter 6 shows that
arguments about adaptive imitation were immensely productive both of
8. See Katherine Eisaman Maus, ‘A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female
Body’, in J. G. Turner (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions,Texts, Images
(Cambridge, 1993), 266–88.
9. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on their
Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford, 2006), 4.45.
concepts and literary fictions. It argues that central features of two of the
most popular and original works to emerge from sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Europe—Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Cervantes’s Don
Quixote—arose from the debates and continuing uncertainties surrounding
the nature of imitatio.
In English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries adaptive
imitation was often combined with what I term in Chapters 6 and 7 ‘formal
imitation’. No aspect of imitation is simple, and formal imitation is no
exception to that rule. The word ‘form’, like the word ‘imitation’, has a
bewilderingly rich array of senses, and theorists and practitioners of formal
imitation were correspondingly diverse. ‘Formal’ imitation in its sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century manifestations was not simply a matter (say) of
author B recognizing that a particular figure of speech or metrical form was
favoured by an earlier author A. The ‘form’ of an author might be akin to a
Platonic Form, which a subsequent author might seek to imitate. It might
be a supra-sensible ‘idea’ of that author which might inspire later writers
with admiration and a desire to emulate it. ‘Formal’ imitation which started
from that sense of the word ‘form’ had much in common with adaptive
imitation, since a quasi-Platonic Form of an author might be imitated in
new words which were suitable for new times.
But other senses of the word ‘form’ were also extremely influential in the
history of imitatio. The ‘forma’ of an earlier author might also be something
more akin to the features which are now generally described as the ‘form’
of a text—its structure of argument, the shaping of its sentences, a pattern
of preferred rhetorical figuration, or a general method of combining and
ordering materials that is peculiar to a particular author. As I argue in Chapters
6 and 7, the arguments surrounding formal imitation (particularly among
German rhetoricians) influenced the ways in which English authors from
the late sixteenth century onwards attempted to create distinctive stylistic
registers of their own, and hence become themselves objects of imitation.
Ben Jonson sought not just to imitate specific texts by Martial and
Horace, but to write in a way that was analogous to the style of those
writers. Hence a style rather than an individual author might be imitated,
and style could encompass a wide range of features—a characteristic
vocabulary or a taste for certain types of rhetorical figure or poetic struc-
tures.10 Ben Jonson brought to the adaptive mode of imitation—turning the
10. For stimulating analogous arguments about Spenser, see David Scott Wilson-Okamura,
Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge, 2013).
I n t roduct ion11
manners and customs of Roman authors into vernacular equivalents—an

acute awareness of the syntactic and rhetorical structures of his originals,
and he imitated those structures. That combination of adaptive and formal
imitation proved immensely influential among Jonson’s imitators, and indeed
those who imitated his imitators, right through to the mid-eighteenth
century. Jonson was therefore in every sense an imitating author: he imitated
authors in such a way as to establish himself as an imitable author.
The reason I concentrate on these two aspects of early modern imitation
in particular is that they were the aspects which mattered most for later
writers, particularly in England. By the 1730s it had become common to use
the word ‘imitation’ in the titles of poems in two quite distinct senses. An
adaptive translation of a classical text, which embedded a satire of Horace in
English customs, might be called an ‘Imitation of Horace’.11 But an exercise
in stylistic pastiche of a past or present English author could at the same date
be called ‘An Imitation of Milton’.The emergence of these distinct kinds of
poem at the same time and under the same name enabled Alexander Pope
to work his characteristic kind of mischievous magic with imitation, and
imitate Horace in the style of his friend Swift, and indeed to publish
anonymously an imitation of Horace said to be ‘Imitated in the Manner of
Mr Pope’.
That, like so much of Pope’s writing, illustrates the creative riches which
could arise from the conceptual richness of the word ‘imitation’. But it also
testifies to the way that adaptive imitation of classical texts evolved in tandem
with a set of conventions for analysing and imitating the style or ‘manner’ of
other vernacular authors. The co-dependent emergence of these two quite
distinct senses of ‘imitation’ derives from the history related in this book.
Thinking of an earlier text as a ‘form’ allows that form to be re-embodied
in the manners of new ages. It also encourages the generation of new
forms of style, or ‘manners’ in the stylistic sense, which can then subse-
quently be imitated.
To put ‘formal’ imitation near the centre of the story of imitatio, as I do,
might seem counter-intuitive. It is easy to assume that there cannot be an
imitation which does not also include some kind of direct verbal allusion or
linguistic debt. Gian Biagio Conte has recently declared that ‘to allege an
imitation without being able to point to convincing traces and proofs would
11. See Harold F. Brooks, ‘The “Imitation” in English Poetry, Especially in Formal Satire, before
the Age of Pope’, The Review of English Studies OS 25 (1949), 124–40.
be a serious betrayal of the intertextual method’.12 ‘Allege’ and ‘proof ’ in this

sentence, however, should sound warning notes: they imply that imitation is
a kind of crime for which the only evidence that can be upheld in a court
of law is a direct verbal debt. The examples from Ben Jonson, explored in
Chapter 7, show that ‘traces and proofs’ need not be restricted to verbal
allusions. Indeed the assumption that a verbal debt is the only criterion of
an imitation has a history which ought to lead us to be circumspect in
seeking to universalize it. Verbal allusions by one poet to another have come
in commentaries to classical and vernacular editions to be called ‘imitations’—
and as Chapter 9 shows, the identification of such ‘imitations’ had by the
eighteenth century become one of the pleasures of reading and a founda-
tional skill in the emergent practice of literary criticism. It was by no means
what ‘imitation’ has always meant.
That very narrow usage of the noun has to a significant degree occluded
the strand in the theory and practice of imitatio which would allow that an
‘imitation’ might have no direct verbal connection with the prior texts on
which the new text is based. It might instead display deep analogies to its
form, in a variety of senses ranging from the ‘idea’ of the author imitated,
through syntactic and rhetorical structures, right down to the appearance of
a poem on the page. Gérard Genette made the striking claim ‘it is impossible
to imitate a text, or—which comes to the same—that one can imitate only a
style: that is to say, a genre’.13 That statement might seem intuitively false if it
is assumed that ‘an imitation’ can refer only to a work which contains a
series of direct verbal parallels with an earlier work. But that assumption is
itself historically contingent.
The act of imitating a text can be akin to what experimental p sychologists
now call ‘emulation’, or ‘observing and attempting to reproduce results of
another’s actions without paying attention to the details of the other’s
behaviour’.14 ‘Emulation’ in this sense is now generally distinguished from
12. Gian Biagio Conte, Stealing the Club from Hercules: On Imitation in Latin Poetry (Berlin and
Boston, 2017), p. 2.
13. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude
Doubinsky (Lincoln, Neb., 1997), p. 83; cf. Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre
and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, trans. Charles Segal (Ithaca, NY, and London,
1986), p. 31, where Segal contrasts the ‘Exemplary Model, the single word to be precisely imi-
tated’ and ‘the Model as Code.’
14. Michael A. Arbib, How the Brain got Language: The Mirror System Hypothesis (Oxford, 2012),
p. 185. ‘Emulation’ or ze l̄ ōsis could in the rhetorical tradition describe either imitatio or a desire
to excel an original, as in Longinus, On the Sublime, 13.2. The usage by experimental psych-
ologists is distinct from that sense.
I n t roduct ion13
what experimental psychologists term ‘imitation’, in which the mannerisms

or gestures of the person imitated are replicated (so a child imitating an
adult who is opening a box might ‘emulate’ the opening of the box, but also
‘imitate’ incidental aspects of the task he is imitating, such as the adult
scratching her nose). Imitatio can encompass either or both of these rela-
tionships. It can entail grasping the principles which underpin a particular
text and extrapolating from them a set of practices for generating a new
text. Those principles might be a large scale-set of relations between the
different elements of an earlier text, or a rhythmic pattern, or a rhetorical
structure, or any of the innumerable features of a text that constitute a ‘style’.
They might include verbal correspondences, but need not do so.
Hence an author might be regarded by an imitator as akin to a genre, or
as a series of texts to which it might be possible to add a new contribution
without making any direct verbal reference to any earlier instance of the
series.The imitator might follow an earlier author’s preference for stanzas of
particular lengths or numbers of syllables, or that author’s use of a particular
rhetorical figure. That is one kind of imitatio.
Accepting that imitating an author entails reading in such a way as to
learn from that author’s practices rather than simply alluding to the words
of that author has implications for thinking about both imitatio and author-
ship. It would be an exaggeration to claim that imitators invent authors, or
that imitating authors always write so that they can become themselves
objects of imitation; but those exaggerations point in the direction of truths.
An imitator observes the features of an author which are distinctive to the
body of texts ascribed to a single name, and draws those to the attention of
later readers—either in a spirit of mischief (in what we now call a parody)
or in a spirit of admiration, or (sometimes) a mixture of the two.15 And
imitators, particularly when they are working across languages, can imitate
in such a way as to foreground rhetorical and lexical features of their own
work which are analogous to those of the earlier text, and which themselves
can become objects of imitation within the new language. It is partly as a
result of authors imitating in this way that national literatures grow and mutate.
But imitatio is not simply a matter of individuals imitating other individuals.
Thinking about a text as having a ‘form’ which is imitable, and thinking
15. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (New York
and London, 1985), p. 12 suggests that ‘Ironic “transcontexualization” is what distinguishes
parody from pastiche or imitation.’
about an author as akin to a ‘genre’ or series of poems with shared features

and genealogical relationships to each other can have a contrary tendency.
It can depersonalize the process of imitation. An imitator of an ‘author-
as-genre’ will imitate not just features common to the poems of Martial, but
might at the same time imitate features of Catullus or of Ben Jonson or any
other author who had written epigrams. And by the same token an imitator
might also imitate texts which have imitated or been imitated by the author
whom he or she is principally imitating. Or an imitator might seek to rep-
licate not just the finished poems ascribed to a particular author, but to
imitate the earlier author’s modes of imitating. As the sixteenth-century
humanist educator Roger Ascham put it ‘the one who intelligently observes
how Cicero followed others will most successfully see how Cicero himself
is to be followed’.16
That form of meta-imitation follows from regarding an author as a
transposable principle rather than a body of text: imitating Virgil without
imitating the way in which Virgil imitated Homer would be to imitate
Virgil’s texts rather than his practices. The result of thinking about author-
ship in this way can be that imitating authors often imitate more than one
earlier writer. It is possible to imitate Milton in the way that Milton imi-
tated Virgil, or to imitate the way Milton imitated Virgil imitating Homer,
or to imitate Statius imitating Virgil imitating Homer. This form of layered
imitation can lead on to what have been termed ‘window references’, in
which an imitated text alludes simultaneously to a source text and to the
text which it is imitating.17 Indeed imitating authors can explore such a
wide range of interconnections between earlier authors that the notion of
an ‘author’ might disperse into a web of textual connections, and lead
outwards from a one-to-one relation between imitator and imitated into
the necessary interconnections between texts which are now generally
called intertextuality.
I have in the following pages made relatively little reference to this topic,
or to the large volume of recent work on the reciprocal relationships
between methods of recording one’s reading and the processes of writing in
the early modern period.18 While it is certainly the case that reading and
16. Roger Ascham, Letters of Roger Ascham, ed. Alvin Vos (New York, 1989), p. 271.
17. See Richard F. Thomas, ‘Virgil’s Georgics and the Art of Reference’, Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology 90 (1986), 171–98 and the forthcoming collection, Colin Burrow, Stephen Harrison,
Martin McLaughlin, and Elisabetta Tarantino, eds., Literary Windows: Imitative Series and Clusters
from Classical to Early Modern Literature.
18. See, e.g., Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’,
in W. Speed Hill, ed., New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghampton, NY, 1993), 131–47, Mary
I n t roduct ion15
writing were (and remain) mutually enforcing activities, I have tended to

emphasize the intellective processes which enable writers to imitate other
writers rather than processes of collection and assimilation and selective
quotation which in different periods and in different ways fuel textual pro-
duction. This is partly a consequence of the kinds of writing with which
I am principally concerned. Writers of discursive prose and of history were
more prone to cull and recombine fragments of text from other authors
than the majority of poets. Prose writers from Montaigne to Burton and
beyond would frequently imitate the flight of Seneca’s eclectic bees, taking
a phrase from Seneca himself and juxtaposing that with an anecdote from
Plutarch or a recondite fact from Pliny. The movement between such pas-
sages would very often be rooted in a systematic or unsystematic prior gath-
ering of textual materials in a commonplace book.19
Poets could sometimes proceed in similarly eclectic fashion: Gordon
Braden has shown how Ben Jonson appears to have produced ‘Drink to me,
only, with thine eyes’ (Forest 9) from the prose of Philostratos ‘as though he
had opened his book, transcribed a few letters, flipped a couple of pages,
transcribed two more, and strung his notes together to make a “poem”’.20
Jonson’s eye could also move through Seneca’s De Beneficiis and mine it for
phrases and themes in order to construct from it a poem thanking a patron
for his generosity, as he did when writing Underwood 13 to Sir Edward
Sackville. Playwrights might also assemble materials, or piece and patch
together sections of text from a range of different works, as well as respond-
ing to lateral connections within and the scenic structures of earlier texts.21
Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth Century England
(Princeton, 1993), Anne Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance
Thought (Oxford, 1996), Ann Blair, ‘Textbooks and Methods of Note-Taking in Early Modern
Europe’, in Emidio Campi, Simone De Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton,
eds., Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe (Geneva, 2008), 39–73, the special
issue of Intellectual History Review 20 no. 3 (2010) on ‘Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe’,
Colin Burrow and Richard Beadle, eds., English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 16: Manuscript
Miscellanies 1450–1700 (London, 2011).
19. For exemplary studies, see Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French
Renaissance (Oxford, 1979), pp. 271–321, Angus Vine, ‘Commercial Commonplacing: Francis
Bacon, the Waste-Book, and the Ledger’, English Manuscript Studies 16 (2011), 197–218, and
Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Commonplacing and Originality: Reading Francis Meres’, The Review of
English Studies 68 (2017), 902–23.
20. Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven,
1978), p. 168.
21. For recent work in this area, see John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Originality (Oxford, 2018), Janet
Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre
(Cambridge, 2014), Colin Burrow, ‘Shakespeare’s Authorities’, in Katie Halsey and Angus Vine,
eds., Shakespeare and Authority: Citations, Conceptions and Constructions (London, 2018), 31–53, Colin
But even acts of culling and reassemblage were often combined with
analysis of how earlier authors put material together—or what Philipp
Melanchthon, following Cicero, was to call ‘collocatio’, the putting together
of words and the structuring of arguments. The use of a particular word
might trigger a memory of a quotation, which in turn may trigger an
attempt to imitate the structure of thought of the text in which it occurs; or
the same process might occur in reverse: an attempt to imitate the larger
structures of thought in an earlier text might trigger a recollection of a
fragment of text, either from the same author, or from the same page of
the imitating author’s commonplace book, or from some idiosyncratic
conjuncture in the pages of the book of memory.22
For these reasons from a very early stage imitatio has been closely linked
with textual appropriation, or what we now term ‘plagiarism’. The fear that
there might be something inherently dishonest about taking the words of
another writer and incorporating them into a new text is a very ancient
one. It has its own complex history, but that history is intimately tied in
with the story of imitatio.23 I begin my discussion of post-classical literature
with Petrarch not because I believe him to have revived lost classical
learning (I emphasize in Chapter 4 how deeply he was indebted to medi-
eval scribal culture and to the scholarship of later antiquity) but because
Petrarch developed his thinking about imitatio in close and uneasy relation-
ship to concerns that an imitator might be accused of stealing the words of
an earlier author.
It is for this reason, I argue, that Petrarch’s Latin epic Africa was particu-
larly drawn towards episodes from classical epic which Petrarch knew had
existed, but of which no textual traces remained—of which the most
notable instance is the meeting between Ennius and the ghost of Homer,
which Petrarch recreates. Such episodes enabled the imitator to recreate the
missing text on the basis of inferences from its surviving portions, but they
also necessarily freed the act of imitation from any suggestion of plagiarism,
Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 2013), Laurie E. Maguire and Emma Smith,
‘What is a Source? Or, How Shakespeare Read his Marlowe’, Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015), 15–31.
22. See Raphael Lyne, Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 2016).
23. Studies of its history and prehistory include Scott McGill, Plagiarism in Latin Literature
(Cambridge, 2012), Stephen Orgel, ‘The Renaissance Artist as Plagiarist’, ELH 48 (1981), 476–95,
Hall Björnstad and Kathy Eden, eds., Borrowed Feathers: Plagiarism and the Limits of Imitation in
Early Modern Europe (Oslo, 2008), Paulina Kewes, ed., Plagiarism in Early Modern England
(Basingstoke, 2003), Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge,
2002), and Tilar J. Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia,
2007).
I n t roduct ion17
since the words of the imitated text were lost. Imitating an episode which
was known to have existed but where the text itself had disappeared—
what I term ‘the lost imitand’—gives both authority and freedom to an
imitating author, and it was towards imitatio of this kind that Petrarch was
particularly drawn.
‘Imitating’ or imaginatively recreating texts which are lost is one extreme
way of separating the act of imitation from that of textual appropriation. It
does not of course preclude other forms of appropriation, or indeed overt
acts of dishonesty: the ability to create a plausible imitation of an author’s
style while reconstructing a supposedly ‘lost’ work was, of course, the key
skill of forgers. William Henry Ireland’s ‘discovery’ of Vortigern and Rowena,
a play supposedly by Shakespeare, set the literary London of the mid-1790s
in a roar.24 Imitators who want their work to be recognized as imitations
have this much in common with forgers: they are dependent on the ability
or willingness of a particular group of readers to associate a particular style
or turn of phrase with a given earlier author.
But doing as Petrarch did, and imitating a text that is not there, marks in a
particularly sharp way the theoretical distinction between learning a practice
from another writer on the one hand and direct verbal citation on the other.
This theoretical distinction is often difficult to sustain in practice, and that is
partly because throughout the history of imitatio imitators have often wished
to show that they are imitating. As a result literary imitators have from the very
earliest phases of the Western tradition tended to display the fact that they are
imitating by providing what we now call ‘allusions’ (although some would
prefer the less sportive term ‘references’) to an earlier text.25 They might do so
either to pay tribute to or gain credit from presenting themselves as analogous
to a famous predecessor. But either way, ‘imitations’ in this sense are intended
to be noticed by specific communities of readers, and stand as invitations to
make comparison between the new text and the earlier one, or to remember
a text related to the new one from which it might partially derive.
Even in earlier Latin writing questions were raised about the propriety of
borrowing from earlier authors in this overt way. Terence in the second
24. See Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot, 1999), Nick
Groom, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London, 2002), and
Jack Lynch, ‘William Henry Ireland’s Authentic Forgeries’, The Princeton University Library
Chronicle 66 (2004), 79–96.
25. On the rhetoric of such allusions, see Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of
Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge, 1998) and Conte, Rhetoric of Imitation. On ‘refer-
ences’, see Thomas, ‘Virgil’s Georgics and the Art of Reference’.
century bc can worry about whether he is a ‘thief ’ when he imitates plays

by Menander which have already been imitated by his Roman contemporaries.
Macrobius in the fifth century ad discussed Virgil’s borrowings from Homer,
and seems to have been responding to an early tradition that criticized the
Roman poet for his thefts.26 If one adds in the involuntary traces of an
earlier text which necessarily slide into the work of one poet who writes
in the same language as another, the entanglement between imitatio and
plagiarism becomes almost a necessary by-product of imitating authors.
This was one reason why it was so alluring to regard imitatio as a matter
of adapting the formal or generic characteristics of past writing to new
times: doing so avoided the stigma that might be attached to a direct verbal
debt. And in the period just before concepts of intellectual property (or
‘literary property’ as it was originally called) acquired the force of law it
became particularly useful to think about the object of imitation as a ‘form’
in a wide range of senses.27 In particular—as Chapter 8 shows in detail—it
enabled an imitator to think of a prior author or text not as a series of
words, but as something akin to an architectural ‘model’ for later works.This
‘model’ could provide a template for the proportions or structure of a text
which followed that ‘model’.
The word ‘model’ is cognate with mould, so a text used as a ‘model’
might give rise to a later text of similar proportions and style, but which
consisted of different matter. But if a prior text was regarded as akin to an
architectural or scalar ‘model’ further possibilities opened up. The propor-
tions of an earlier text might be reproduced on either a smaller or larger
scale by an imitator, who would still be following the ‘model’ whether it was
minimized or maximized, since a ‘model’ stipulates a specific set of ratios or
proportions between parts or elements rather than a specific size. Hence an
ancient act of heroism, viewed as a set of ratios between elements, could be
imitated on either a larger or a smaller scale. The technique of upscaling or
downsizing an earlier text is at least as old as the (probably) fifth century
bc Batrachomyomachia, in which frogs and mice do battle in Homerical
language; but the use of the word ‘model’ to describe the imitated text gave
giddy new dimensions to that technique.28
26. See McGill, Plagiarism in Latin Literature.
27. On the ways in which women writers could imitate the forms of other writers, see Elizabeth
Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement:Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640–1680 (Oxford, 2013).
28. See Ritchie Robertson, Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine (Oxford, 2009), pp. 50–1, and
John S. Coolidge, ‘Great Things and Small:The Virgilian Progression’, Comparative Literature 17
(1965), 1–23.
I n t roduct ion19
Milton played a key role in the emergent tendency to treat prior texts as
‘models’ in this scalar sense, and this is one reason he is positioned if not
physically then intellectually at the centre of this book.With Milton, I argue
in Chapter 8, we see imitatio being aggressively associated with the produc-
tion of such scalar replicas of earlier texts. His angels can re-enact the wars
of Homer on a cosmic scale, which can simultaneously inflate and deflate
their heroism by making it at once sublimely, or, to mortal eyes, comically
vast. Or his devils can shrink to the size of bees in order to imitate a Homeric
council scene. These scalar effects were a significant aspect of the changes
which Milton wrought in the practice of imitatio, and show the potential
force of regarding a classical text as a ‘model’. It could be the great template
of an imitating author’s own text, or it could be tiny anticipation of the
massive divine archetype which came to supersede the tiny ‘models’ of
the ancients.
This in turn gave the act of imitating an earlier poem a powerful double
force. On the one hand an imitation of a ‘model’ might be no more than a
miniaturized replica of an earlier archetype. But on the other hand by the
act of imitating an imitator turned the prior text into a ‘model’, and
therefore might reduce it in scale to a mere miniaturized anticipation of its
later and greater realization. Like the plan of a temple, a ‘model’ was at
once an archetype of potential vastness and a tiny unrealized source of
potential greatness.
Many apparently contradictory elements in Milton—his own highly
imitable and indeed eminently parodiable style, his wary treatment of
human ‘imitations’ of divinity, his emphasis on inspiration—situated Paradise
Lost within the long slow shift towards a poetics which valued originality
and the development of a personal manner or style. But his simultaneous
amplification and diminution of his classical models also had a significant
effect on how later writers imitated. He displayed a method by which past
writing could seem simultaneously big and small. The mock heroic and the
mock epic as developed by Alexander Pope, in which tiny events—the theft
of a lock of hair, the plagiaristic practices of bad eighteenth-century poets—
become imitations of great originals which simultaneously amplify and
diminish those originals, and which skew and unsettle the relative propor-
tions and significance of the present and antiquity, is massively indebted to
Milton’s scalar poetics.29
29. See Robertson, Mock-Epic Poetry, pp. 49–99 and, for parodies of the War in Heaven, pp. 288–99.
In the chapters after Milton I turn to vernacular texts, and in particular

to the imitation of Milton. I do so because by the mid-eighteenth century
the category of ‘the classics’ was frequently expanded to include canonical
English authors such as Shakespeare and Milton. But I also do so because
Milton figured prominently in a series of legal and literary arguments about
textual ownership which had a profound effect on the way in which imita-
tion was thought about and practised in the later eighteenth century and
beyond. Britain was the first nation in the world to introduce legislation
about what is now called copyright. This legislation was preceded and
followed by extensive philosophical and legal discussion of what was termed
‘literary property’. British copyright legislation was, as many scholars have
shown, driven not by a desire to protect the interests of authors but by an
influential group of London stationers, who wanted to protect their right to
print the ‘copy’ of early authors from their competitors.30 These included
the rights to publish the works of Milton, for which there remained a
constant demand.
Milton was not just a piece of intellectual property, however. He was also
something which resembled a common resource. He had imitated the style
of classical epic to generate a style that was so readily identifiable as his own
that he had himself become the object of deliberate stylistic imitation by
1700. That style was so widely imitated that it came to shape the nature of
what Wordsworth, in the extended 1802 Preface to The Lyrical Ballads, was
to describe with some hostility as ‘poetic diction’. Milton by the end of the
eighteenth century was part of the literary landscape and an element in
the air that later poets breathed.
Those metaphors are not simply hyperbolical. The arguments that led to
vernacular authors such as Milton being regarded as ‘classics’ or as common
goods which could be imitated freely were full of comparisons of earlier
writing to landscapes or water or the common goods of life. And that went
along with some subtle but profound changes in the metaphorical language
used by literary critics and legal theorists to describe the activities of an
imitating author. As Chapter 9 shows, the ‘classics’—both ancient writing
and earlier English texts—were sometimes presented in legal and critical
discourse as a kind of common property akin to a piece of publicly owned
30. John Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (London,
1994) offers a reliable account. For wider implications, see Adrian Johns, Piracy:The Intellectual
Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago, Ill., and London, 2009) and William St. Clair,
The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004).
I n t roduct ion21
land, on which anyone could freely graze.The imitator might pluck the odd
flower of fancy from this common store, but could not claim to own its full
riches. An author might establish something akin to an estate within this
terrain, across which others might pass, enjoying a right of way over it but
no wider rights of ownership.
Classical literature was unequivocally part of that ‘common store’ from
which all could draw. But earlier vernacular literature was not quite so
straightforwardly a common resource. Like the work of contemporary
vernacular authors it could simultaneously be regarded as a species of
personal property, trespassing on which was potentially fraught with hazard.
Eighteenth-century debates about imitation and ‘literary property’ positioned
Milton right in the middle of this landscape: he was both a common good,
and a piece of literary property. That is a further reason why he became at
once such a powerful resource for later poets and potentially also a source
of anxiety.
This had a profound influence on Milton’s most ambitious imitator,
William Wordsworth (one of the main subjects of Chapter 9). Wordsworth
sought, as he put it, ‘to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very
language of men’.31 The object of imitation, he claimed, was not the lan-
guage or practice of another poet, or Miltonic poetic diction, but a language
common to all. But Wordsworth too was an imitating author. His aspiration
to represent in enhanced and elevated form the experiences of common
men went along with an elaborate refashioning of one of the oldest metaphors
for the imitative poet: that of someone who follows in the footsteps of an
earlier author. The master-image of Wordsworth’s writing is that of a poet
who wanders across a landscape which is criss-crossed with roads and public
rights of way, which might lead on to sublime spaces of unknown nature. As
he moves through that landscape he attempts to transform its common
elements, its breezes and waters, all of which are the common, shared
experiences of mankind, into the substance of his own experience and the
inspiration for his verse. All the while, however, those landscapes are haunted
by the shades, and by the language and linguistic mannerisms, of Milton.
Wordsworth responded to the arguments about the relationships between
imitatio and intellectual property over the previous centuries by fashioning
a landscape in which the common goods of the earth—breezes, waters,
31. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: with Pastoral and Other
Poems, in Two Volumes, 2 vols. (London, 1802), p. xviii.
public highways—subsist alongside proprietorial spaces over which other

poets or landowners might have control. Wordsworth’s attempts to remake
the epic tradition in The Recluse and The Prelude are thus repeatedly shaped
by the changing legal and critical language in which arguments about
imitation were conducted.
Thinking about imitatio has never been entirely insulated from thinking
about a wide range of concepts with which it is close kin. Chapter 9 shows
how arguments about literary property and copyright radically reshaped the
theory and practice of literary imitation. Chapter 10 turns to a rather different
but equally influential area. It argues that the long history of writing about
the manufacture of artificial human beings—which was a central compo-
nent in Enlightenment arguments about the relationship between body and
spirit—also had a profound influence on the way in which imitatio was
understood in the nineteenth century and beyond. Could a human artist
not just imitate an earlier poem, but create a mechanical creature which
could imitate life so completely that it could use language in the same way
as a human being, or even a poet?
That was a threatening question on many levels, since if the answer were
affirmative it would destroy the traditional view of human beings as imma-
terial souls harnessed to material bodies. Human beings would be all matter,
a mechanically replicable machine without a ghost or soul inside it, and
consequently entirely imitable agents. The process of imitating, of reassem-
bling materials from past texts into new, living form, has long had a ssociations
with necromancy and with the uncanny reawakening of the dead. Those
associations run right back to the nekyia or summoning up the spirits of the
dead in Book 11 of the Odyssey, in which the poet of the Odyssey—who
was in all probability an artful imitator of the Iliad poet—describes the
ghosts of the dead drinking the blood of a sacrifice, which reanimates
the heroes of the Iliad.32 That association between imitation and the revival of
the dead was given further strength by Milton’s extraordinary creation of the
monstrous shadow that actually is Death, who was himself a kind of reanima-
tion of Virgil’s ghost of Hector, whose lethal vitality derived from the long-
established tendency to regard a malign imitation as a simulacrum or shadow of
a formerly living exemplum. Combine these with the arguments about artificial
persons and the elements were all in place for the creation of an imitated being
who was at once a simulacrum of life and a mortal threat to its creator.
32. For imitations of the Iliad, see M. L. West, The Making of the Odyssey (Oxford, 2014), esp. p. 25.
On the nekyia, see Glenn Most, ‘Il poeta nell’Ade: catabasi epica e teoria dell’epos tra Omero
e Virgilio’, Studi italiani di filologia classica 10 (1992), 1014–26.
I n t roduct ion23
When Mary Shelley set about to imitate German gothic tales in the
summer of 1816 that creation staggered into life. Frankenstein’s monster, a
being made from dead limbs that lives and talks, draws its life from a long
series of arguments about the ways in which matter could be made to live,
fused with centuries of argument about what it is to imitate an earlier
author. Mary Shelley’s creation imitates both Milton’s Satan and Milton’s
Eve. The monster reads Paradise Lost, and describes how he learnt what he
was through a direct imitative transformation of Milton’s Eve, and of the
moment when Eve looks at herself in a pool and creatively imitates Ovid’s
Narcissus. And the mysterious processes used by Frankenstein to animate his
monster are a gothic reimagining of the central problem in the tradition of
imitative writing: how does new autonomous life emerge from an assimila-
tion or digestion of past authors?
That uncanny afterlife of Milton also reflects a much wider tendency.
Once an authorial corpus is regarded as a ‘body’ of work which displays iden-
tifiable and potentially quantifiable characteristics—a preference for particular
verbal collocations, a disposition to describe characteristic kinds of scene—
that corpus might be seen as extensible after the death of its principal creator,
and as replicable thing. It might be brought to life again by a ‘formula’
derived from statistical analysis of the ‘corpus’ of prior works, from which
further texts could be generated. The possibility of mechanically replicating
a text or a human being in turn raises in stark form the recurrent question
about the relationship between the visible series of texts ascribed to a single
person and the invisible ingenium or talent or genius which is believed to
have produced them.
That relationship had been on the edges of discussions about imitatio
from early modernity onwards, when lexica and concordances began to
make it possible to generate texts that closely resembled the verbal manner-
isms of Cicero. Discussions of the different styles of authors, from Cicero
onwards, implicitly raise the question ‘what distinguishes this writer from
that writer?’That question could be answered by saying ‘it is a disposition to
write in this way’, or ‘that was the nature of his talent or ingenium’; or it
could be answered in a more quantifiable manner, by noting the frequency
with which Cicero ends a sentence with ‘esse videatur’, or by compiling
statistical analyses of his habitual collocations. If those quantificatory
methods of stylistic analysis are combined with a heightened version of the
tendency in early discussions of imitatio to emphasize the inimitable, lost
ingenium or talent of a past author they have the potential to generate a
profound perplexity. When these two myths collide an author might be
regarded as at one and the same time a unique, inimitable talent and as an
algorithm that could generate more works of a similar kind. Those two
concepts not only seem to be but actually are radically incompatible.
I suggest at the end of the book that this perplexing fusion of concepts,
the partial genesis of which can be tracked back through the history of
imitatio, is particularly evident in our own cultural moment. Human behav-
iour is increasingly seen as predictable by machines, and yet we are also
repeatedly told that human beings make choices—as consumers, as lovers,
and as writers. Machines can replicate and anticipate many of our choices,
of what we buy, of who we are likely to love, and of the word which we
are most likely to write next.The ghost and the machine have never seemed
more closely allied, and yet have never been so widely separated.The machine
mimics the ghost, and the ghost cries out that it nonetheless has a choice,
that it is more than the machine. Poetry has frequently been regarded as a
product of the human spirit, of the ingenium or unquantifiable genius of the
author. But now poetry, or at least verse of a kind, can be produced by
online bot-poetry engines at the click of a mouse. Could a machine imitate
the unreplicably human thing we call genius? Could a computer replicate
the practices of a human imitator of earlier poems?
Although I believe that the answer to those questions for now and for a
long time to come is ‘no’, I do argue in the Postscript to this book that the
long-running history of arguments about imitatio has fed indirectly into a
range of contemporary philosophical and fictional conundrums and creative
anxieties about the boundaries between the human and the non-human.
Those arguments play a part in Alan Turing’s influential discussions of what
he termed ‘the imitation game’, in which a computer is programmed to
replicate the behaviour of human language users.33 They also have a shaping
influence on the rich body of science fiction (in fiction and in film) about
clones and replicants. These children of Frankenstein’s monster, who was
himself an offspring of Milton, raise in new forms questions which run
through the history of authors imitating authors: can a replicant reproduce
whatever it is that is peculiar to its original? They also directly address the
question which has been a preoccupation of philosophers at least since
Descartes: could human consciousness be imitated by a machine which
simply sought to replicate the outward linguistic behaviours of human beings?
Those questions have generated a rich body of both philosophical discus-
sion and fiction since the 1950s.The story of the android that can b iologically
reproduce itself and become indistinguishable from a human being (in Blade
33. A. M. Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind 59 (1950), 433–60.
I n t roduct ion25
Runner 2049), or (in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) of the clone who
wishes to create rather than merely to imitate, are fables which arise from
the long story of imitatio. And they are fables which speak to our present
concerns. The unsettling conjunction in classical writing about imitatio
between the vanishing marvel that is the mind of Cicero and the possibility
of replicating that mind through imitating his words is made into a creative
disjunction in clone fictions; and the insistence in the tradition of writing
about imitatio that the ‘true’ or ‘good’ or ‘successful’ imitator is an autono-
mous being who resembles an exemplum as a child resembles its parent,
rather than a mere replicant of an earlier text, is one which, with much
mutating of mutandorum and indeed mutating of mutants, has become one
of the master tropes of contemporary culture. The fear and curiosity that
artificial humans can produce is the product of a different world from Virgil’s
imitations of Homer or Ennius or Lucretius. But the long and rich history
of imitatio creates a sinuous path that ties these phenomena together. So the
story I am telling is not simply one about how highly educated poets
imitated and thought about other highly educated poets in past centuries. It
is finally about how we think about what it is to be a human agent today.
*
The pages that follow offer a broadly historical account of imitatio, beginning
with early Greek philosophical and literary texts, and running onwards
towards futurity. I aim to tell a coherent story which connects with present-
day concerns rather than to provide a comprehensive history. I concentrate
on a set of recurrent issues (adaptive imitation, formal imitation, the rela-
tionship between imitation and plagiarism), a set of key texts which are
repeated objects of imitation (the ghost of Hector arises repeatedly from the
dead in the pages that follow), and a repertoire of metaphors which repeatedly
animate both the practice and the theory of imitatio (chiefly the o pposition
between the ‘living’ assimilation of texts by digestion or rebirth as against
the creation of ghostly replicants or simulacra).
There are many major areas which I do not consider—Shelley’s imitations
of Greek poetry, for instance, or Wyatt’s imitations of Petrarch, Ezra Pound’s
‘Homage’ to Sextus Propertius, or indeed the endlessly multiplying ‘imitations’
of classical texts in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries—
because it would be impossible to cover all this terrain in a single book.34
Hoccleve and Lydgate and Henryson and Spenser all imitated Chaucer;
34. Patrick Cheney, Rita Copeland, Philip Hardie, David Hopkins, Charles Martindale, Norman
Vance, and Jennifer Wallace, eds., The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature,
5 vols. (Oxford, 2012–) offers comprehensive coverage.
Chaucer and Gower imitated Ovid and Virgil;35 Dante imitated Virgil and
Ovid and Statius. Throughout the middle ages responses to classical texts—
often mediated through commentaries and through p edagogical practices
derived from the classical rhetorical tradition—generated a wealth of fictions,
as Rita Copeland has explored in a series of brilliant studies.36 These are all
versions of imitation.
The central arguments of the later sections of this book, however, are
closely connected with the reception history of a group of rhetorical texts—
the later rhetorical works of Cicero and the complete text of Quintilian’s
Institutes—which were not rediscovered until the fifteenth century. They
provided the metaphors which were so vital to later imitating authors, and
they provoked detailed rhetorical analysis of earlier texts and of the styles of
earlier authors. Because of my focus on the reception history of these texts
I have not included a chapter on fourteenth-century, or ‘Ricardian’, poets as
imitators.37 I would not wish this to be taken as a sign that I am yet another
credulous believer in the humanist myth that the middle ages were dark
days of ignorance, in which scholars and poets sat waiting for the light from
Troy to bring a new dawn. It will be clear from my discussion of Petrarch
in Chapter 4 that this was a myth by which humanists sought to exaggerate
the differences between their practices and those of the immediate past.
Medieval authors had a rich understanding of the classical tradition, but it is
a rather different kind of understanding from that which runs through the
particular story that I am telling.
There is a huge amount that could be said about other areas too.
Supplementation, forgery, centos, and the ways in which spurious works are
insinuated into an authorial canon all could be regarded as versions of
imitation. An endless book could be written about the ways in which non-
European cultures have imitated and transformed canonical works from the
35. See, e.g., Andrew Galloway, ‘Ovid in Chaucer and Gower’, in John F. Miller and Carole
E. Newlands, eds., A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Chichester, 2014), 187–201, James G.
Clark, Frank Thomas Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley, eds., Ovid in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge, 2011). For an argument that responses to Ovid before 1547 are freer than those
of the later period, see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), pp.
131–60. On Virgil, see, e.g., Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid
from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995), John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser
and Virgilian Epic (New Haven, 1995), and Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido:The Classics
in the Medieval Classroom (Princeton, 2018).
36. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and
Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991) and Rita Copeland, ed., The Oxford History of Classical
Reception in English Literature:Volume 1, 800–1558 (Oxford, 2016).
37. See J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet (London, 1971).
I n t roduct ion27
countries that have dominated them or which they have dominated.

Imitation is so central to the processes of identity-formation both for
individuals and cultures that the topic has no self-evident conceptual,
historical, or geographical boundaries. It is a key way in which a subaltern
culture can reconfigure the influences which have come to dominate it, and
through which it can appraise its status as a replicant of an earlier culture, as
a subversive mimic which questions the values of that culture, or as an
autonomous entity.
Imitatio was, after all, one means by which the most powerful yet culturally
subject nation of all—Rome—addressed its relations to Greece, and vice
versa. As Horace put it: ‘Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive,
and she brought the arts into rustic Latium’ (‘Graecia capta ferum victorem
cepit et artis | intulit agresti Latio’, Epistles, 2.1.156–7). Those lines can
themselves be transposed to describe multiple different cultural relation-
ships, as the imitation of them by Alexander Pope illustrates very neatly: ‘We
conquer’d France, but felt our captive’s charms; | Her arts victorious
triumph’d o’er our Arms.’38 The imitative relationship between the con-
quering Rome and its Greek-speaking subject peoples, however, was not
simply a matter of a colonizer adopting the culture of the conquered. As
Tim Whitmarsh has said of Greek writers under the Roman empire, imita-
tion was ‘not simply a means of marking a stable relationship between two
fixed co-ordinates, the present and the past; it was a locus of conflict between
various groups trying (vainly) to define that relationship in different ways’.39
The empire could write back.
The practice of imitation has, from at least the mid-twentieth century
onwards, been subjected to critique and critical transformation by writers
who wish to position themselves outside the dominant canon of European
writing. It is not hard to see why. Imitatio could readily be seen as an engine
of patrilinear supremacy, which ensures the replication of a dominant set of
values, descending from fathers to sons. Citizens of nations that were
governed for generations by white men trained to compose Virgilian
hexameters have particularly strong reasons to see imitation in that light,
and to be suspicious of it as an ideological instrument.
38. Text from Alexander Pope, The Poems: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected
Annotations, ed. John Butt (London, 1963).
39. Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (Oxford,
2001), p. 29.
Another random document with
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pulpit before you came here, as I more or less did myself, but if you
were a boy of twenty-one or -two, do you think you’d become a
preacher now, way things are?”
“Why, Brother!” grieved the dean. “Certainly I would! What a
question! What would become of all our work at Terwillinger, all our
ideals in opposition to the heathenish large universities, if the
ministry weren’t the highest ideal—”
“I know. I know. I just wonder sometimes— All the new vocations
that are coming up. Medicine. Advertising. World just going it! I tell
you, Dean, in another forty years, by 1943, men will be up in the air
in flying machines, going maybe a hundred miles an hour!”
“My dear fellow, if the Lord had meant men to fly, he’d have given
us wings.”
“But there are prophecies in the Book—”
“Those refer purely to spiritual and symbolic flying. No, no! Never
does to oppose the clear purpose of the Bible, and I could dig you
out a hundred texts that show unquestionably that the Lord intends
us to stay right here on earth till that day when we shall be upraised
in the body with him.”
“Herumph! Maybe. Well, here’s my corner. Good night, Brother.”
The dean came into his house. It was a small house.
“How’d it go?” asked his wife.
“Splendid. Young Gantry seemed to feel an unmistakable divine
call. Something struck him that just uplifted him. He’s got a lot of
power. Only—”
The dean irritably sat down in a cane-seated rocker, jerked off his
shoes, grunted, drew on his slippers.
“Only, hang it, I simply can’t get myself to like him! Emma, tell
me: If I were his age now, do you think I’d go into the ministry, as
things are today?”
“Why, Henry! What in the world ever makes you say a thing like
that? Of course you would! Why, if that weren’t the case— What
would our whole lives mean, all we’ve given up and everything?”
“Oh, I know. I just get to thinking. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve
given up so much. Don’t hurt even a preacher to face himself! After
all, those two years when I was in the carpet business, before I went
to the seminary, I didn’t do very well. Maybe I wouldn’t have made
any more than I do now. But if I could— Suppose I could’ve been a
great chemist? Wouldn’t that (mind you, I’m just speculating, as a
student of psychology)—wouldn’t that conceivably be better than
year after year of students with the same confounded problems over
and over again—and always so pleased and surprised and important
about them!—or year after year again of standing in the pulpit and
knowing your congregation don’t remember what you’ve said seven
minutes after you’ve said it?”
“Why, Henry, I don’t know what’s gotten into you! I think you
better do a little praying yourself instead of picking on this poor
young Gantry! Neither you nor I could ever have been happy except
in a Baptist church or a real cover-to-cover Baptist college.”
The dean’s wife finished darning the towels and went up to say
good-night to her parents.
They had lived with her since her father’s retirement, at seventy-
five, from his country pastorate. He had been a missionary in
Missouri before the Civil War.
Her lips had been moving, her eyebrows working, as she darned
the towels; her eyebrows were still creased as she came into their
room and shrieked at her father’s deafness:
“Time to go to bed, Papa. And you, Mama.”
They were nodding on either side of a radiator unheated for
months.
“All right, Emmy,” piped the ancient.
“Say, Papa— Tell me: I’ve been thinking: If you were just a young
man today, would you go into the ministry?”
“Course I would! What an idea! Most glorious vocation young
man could have. Idea! G’night, Emmy!”
But as his ancient wife sighingly removed her corsets, she
complained, “Don’t know as you would or not—if I was married to
you—which ain’t any too certain, a second time—and if I had
anything to say about it!”
“Which is certain! Don’t be foolish. Course I would.”
“I don’t know. Fifty years I had of it, and I never did get so I wa’n’t
just mad clear through when the ladies of the church came poking
around, criticizing me for every little tidy I put on the chairs, and
talking something terrible if I had a bonnet or a shawl that was the
least mite tasty. ‘ ’Twa’n’t suitable for a minister’s wife.’ Drat ’em! And
I always did like a bonnet with some nice bright colors. Oh, I’ve done
a right smart of thinking about it. You always were a powerful
preacher, but’s I’ve told you—”
“You have!”
“—I never could make out how, if when you were in the pulpit you
really knew so much about all these high and mighty and mysterious
things, how it was when you got home you never knew enough, and
you never could learn enough, to find the hammer or make a nice
piece of corn-bread or add up a column of figures twice alike or find
Oberammergau on the map of Austria!”
“Germany, woman! I’m sleepy!”
“And all these years of having to pretend to be so good when we
were just common folks all the time! Ain’t you glad you can just be
simple folks now?”
“Maybe it is restful. But that’s not saying I wouldn’t do it over
again.” The old man ruminated a long while. “I think I would. Anyway,
no use discouraging these young people from entering the ministry.
Somebody got to preach the gospel truth, ain’t they?”
“I suppose so. Oh, dear. Fifty years since I married a preacher!
And if I could still only be sure about the virgin birth! Now don’t you
go explaining! Laws, the number of times you’ve explained! I know
it’s true—it’s in the Bible. If I could only believe it! But—
“I would of liked to had you try your hand at politics. If I could of
been, just once, to a senator’s house, to a banquet or something,
just once, in a nice bright red dress with gold slippers, I’d of been
willing to go back to alpaca and scrubbing floors and listening to you
rehearsing your sermons, out in the stable, to that old mare we had
for so many years—oh, laws, how long is it she’s been dead now?
Must be—yes, it’s twenty-seven years—
“Why is it that it’s only in religion that the things you got to believe
are agin all experience? Now drat it, don’t you go and quote that ‘I
believe because it is impossible’ thing at me again! Believe because
it’s impossible! Huh! Just like a minister!
“Oh, dear, I hope I don’t live long enough to lose my faith. Seems
like the older I get, the less I’m excited over all these preachers that
talk about hell only they never saw it.
“Twenty-seven years! And we had that old hoss so long before
that. My how she could kick— Busted that buggy—”
They were both asleep.
CHAPTER V
I
in the cottonwood grove by the muddy river, three miles west of
Paris, Kansas, the godly were gathered with lunch-baskets, linen
dusters, and moist unhappy babies for the all-day celebration.
Brothers Elmer Gantry and Edward Fislinger had been licensed to
preach before, but now they were to be ordained as full-fledged
preachers, as Baptist ministers.
They had come home from distant Mizpah Theological Seminary
for ordination by their own council of churches, the Kayooska River
Baptist Association. Both of them had another year to go out of the
three-year seminary course, but by the more devout and rural
brethren it is considered well to ordain the clerics early, so that even
before they attain infallible wisdom they may fill backwoods pulpits
and during week-ends do good works with divine authority.
His vacation after college Elmer had spent on a farm; during
vacation after his first year in seminary he had been supervisor in a
boys’ camp; now, after ordination, he was to supply at the smaller
churches in his corner of Kansas.
During his second year of seminary, just finished, he had been
more voluminously bored than ever at Terwillinger. Constantly he
had thought of quitting, but after his journeys to the city of Monarch,
where he was in closer relation to fancy ladies and to bartenders
than one would have desired in a holy clerk, he got a second wind in
his resolve to lead a pure life, and so managed to keep on toward
perfection, as symbolized by the degree of Bachelor of Divinity.
But if he had been bored, he had acquired professional training.
He was able now to face any audience and to discourse
authoritatively on any subject whatever, for any given time to the
second, without trembling and without any errors of speech beyond
an infrequent “ain’t” or “he don’t.” He had an elegant vocabulary. He
knew eighteen synonyms for sin, half of them very long and
impressive, and the others very short and explosive and minatory—
minatory being one of his own best words, constantly useful in
terrifying the as yet imaginary horde of sinners gathered before him.
He was no longer embarrassed by using the most intimate
language about God; without grinning he could ask a seven-year-old
boy, “Don’t you want to give up your vices?” and without flinching he
could look a tobacco salesman in the eye and demand, “Have you
ever knelt before the throne of grace?”
Whatever worldly expressions he might use in sub rosa
conversations with the less sanctified theological students, such as
Harry Zenz, who was the most confirmed atheist in the school, in
public he never so much as said “doggone,” and he had on tap, for
immediate and skilled use, a number of such phrases as “Brother, I
am willing to help you find religion,” “My whole life is a testimonial to
my faith,” “To the inner eye there is no trouble in comprehending the
three-fold nature of divinity,” “We don’t want any long-faced
Christians in this church—the fellow that’s been washed in the blood
of the Lamb is just so happy he goes ’round singing and hollering
hallelujah all day long,” and “Come on now, all get together, and let’s
make this the biggest collection this church has ever seen.” He could
explain foreordination thoroughly, and he used the words “baptizo”
and “Athanasian.”
He would, perhaps, be less orchestral, less Palladian, when he
had been in practise for a year or two after graduation and
discovered that the hearts of men are vile, their habits low, and that
they are unwilling to hand the control of all those habits over to the
parson. But he would recover again, and he was a promise of what
he might be in twenty years, as a ten-thousand-dollar seer.
He had grown broader, his glossy hair, longer than at Terwillinger,
was brushed back from his heavy white brow, his nails were oftener
clean, and his speech was Jovian. It was more sonorous, more
measured and pontifical; he could, and did, reveal his interested
knowledge of your secret moral diabetes merely by saying, “How are
we today, Brother?”
And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on
“Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt” had won the ten-dollar prize
in Practical Theology.
II
He walked among the Kayooska Valley communicants, beside
his mother. She was a small-town business woman; she was not
unduly wrinkled or shabby; indeed she wore a good little black hat
and a new brown silk frock with a long gold chain; but she was
inconspicuous beside his bulk and sober magnificence.
He wore for the ceremony a new double-breasted suit of black
broadcloth, and new black shoes. So did Eddie Fislinger, along with
a funereal tie and a black wide felt hat, like a Texas congressman’s.
But Elmer was more daring. Had he not understood that he must
show dignity, he would have indulged himself in the gaudiness for
which he had a talent. He had compromised by buying a beautiful
light gray felt hat in Chicago, on his way home, and he had ventured
on a red-bordered gray silk handkerchief, which gave a pleasing
touch of color to his sober chest.
But he had left off, for the day, the large opal ring surrounded by
almost gold serpents for which he had lusted and to which he had
yielded when in liquor, in the city of Monarch.
He walked as an army with banners, he spoke like a trombone,
he gestured widely with his large blanched thick hand; and his
mother, on his arm, looked up in ecstasy. He wafted her among the
crowd, affable as a candidate for probate judgeship, and she was
covered with the fringes of his glory.
For the ordination, perhaps two hundred Baptist laymen and
laywomen and at least two hundred babies had come in from
neighboring congregations by buckboard, democrat wagon, and
buggy. (It was 1905; there was as yet no Ford nearer than Fort
Scott.) They were honest, kindly, solid folk; farmers and blacksmiths
and cobblers; men with tanned deep-lined faces, wearing creased
“best suits”; the women, deep bosomed or work-shriveled, in clean
gingham. There was one village banker, very chatty and democratic,
in a new crash suit. They milled like cattle, in dust up to their shoe
laces, and dust veiled them, in the still heat, under the dusty
branches of the cottonwoods from which floated shreds to catch and
glisten on the rough fabric of their clothes.
Six preachers had combined to assist the Paris parson in his
ceremony, and one of them was no less than the Rev. Dr. Ingle,
come all the way from St. Joe, where he was said to have a Sunday
School of six hundred. As a young man—very thin and eloquent in a
frock coat—Dr. Ingle had for six months preached in Paris, and Mrs.
Gantry remembered him as her favorite minister. He had been so
kind to her when she was ill; had come in to read “Ben Hur” aloud,
and tell stories to a chunky little Elmer given to hiding behind
furniture and heaving vegetables at visitors.
“Well, well, Brother, so this is the little tad I used to know as a
shaver! Well, you always were a good little mannie, and they tell me
that now you’re a consecrated young man—that you’re destined to
do a great work for the Lord,” Dr. Ingle greeted Elmer.
“Thank you, Doctor. Pray for me. It’s an honor to have you come
from your great church,” said Elmer.
“Not a bit of trouble. On my way to Colorado—I’ve taken a cabin
way up in the mountains there—glorious view—sunsets—painted by
the Lord himself. My congregation have been so good as to give me
two months’ vacation. Wish you could pop up there for a while,
Brother Elmer.”
“I wish I could, Doctor, but I have to try in my humble way to keep
the fires burning around here.”
Mrs. Gantry was panting. To have her little boy discoursing with
Dr. Ingle as though they were equals! To hear him talking like a
preacher—just as natural! And some day—Elmer with a famous
church; with a cottage in Colorado for the summer; married to a dear
pious little woman, with half a dozen children; and herself invited to
join them for the summer; all of them kneeling in family prayers, led
by Elmer . . . though it was true Elmer declined to hold family prayers
just now; said he’d had too much of it in seminary all year . . . too
bad, but she’d keep on coaxing . . . and if he just would stop
smoking, as she’d begged and besought him to do . . . well, perhaps
if he didn’t have a few naughtinesses left, he wouldn’t hardly be her
little boy any more. . . . How she’d had to scold once upon a time to
get him to wash his hands and put on the nice red woolen wristlets
she’d knitted for him!
No less satisfying to her was the way in which Elmer impressed
all their neighbors. Charley Watley, the house-painter, commander of
the Ezra P. Nickerson Post of the G. A. R. of Paris, who had always
pulled his white mustache and grunted when she had tried to explain
Elmer’s hidden powers of holiness, took her aside to admit: “You
were right, Sister; he makes a fine upstanding young man of God.”
They encountered that town problem, Hank McVittle, the
druggist. Elmer and he had been mates; together they had stolen
sugar-corn, drunk hard cider, and indulged in haymow venery. Hank
was a small red man, with a lascivious and knowing eye. It was
certain that he had come today only to laugh at Elmer.
They met face on, and Hank observed, “Morning, Mrs. Gantry.
Well, Elmy, going to be a preacher, eh?”
“I am, Hank.”
“Like it?” Hank was grinning and scratching his cheek with a
freckled hand; other unsanctified Parisians were listening.
Elmer boomed, “I do, Hank. I love it! I love the ways of the Lord,
and I don’t ever propose to put my foot into any others! Because I’ve
tasted the fruit of evil, Hank—you know that. And there’s nothing to
it. What fun we had, Hank, was nothing to the peace and joy I feel
now. I’m kind of sorry for you, my boy.” He loomed over Hank,
dropped his paw heavily on his shoulder. “Why don’t you try to get
right with God? Or maybe you’re smarter than he is!”
“Never claimed to be anything of the sort!” snapped Hank, and in
that testiness Elmer triumphed, his mother exulted.
She was sorry to see how few were congratulating Eddie
Fislinger, who was also milling, but motherless, inconspicuous, meek
to the presiding clergy.
Old Jewkins, humble, gentle old farmer, inched up to murmur,
“Like to shake your hand, Brother Elmer. Mighty fine to see you
chosen thus and put aside for the work of the Lord. Jiggity! T’ think I
remember you as knee-high to a grasshopper! I suppose you study a
lot of awful learned books now.”
“They make us work good and hard, Brother Jewkins. They give
us pretty deep stuff: hermeneutics, chrestomathy, pericopes,
exegesis, homiletics, liturgics, isagogics, Greek and Hebrew and
Aramaic, hymnology, apologetics—oh, a good deal.”
“Well! I should say so!” worshiped old Jewkins, while Mrs. Gantry
marveled to find Elmer even more profound than she had thought,
and Elmer reflected proudly that he really did know what all but a
couple of the words meant.
“My!” sighed his mother. “You’re getting so educated, I declare t’
goodness pretty soon I won’t hardly dare to talk to you!”
“Oh, no. There’ll never come a time when you and I won’t be the
best of pals, or when I won’t need the inspiration of your prayers!”
said Elmer Gantry melodiously, with refined but manly laughter.
III
They were assembling on benches, wagon-seats and boxes for
the ceremony of ordination.
The pulpit was a wooden table with a huge Bible and a pitcher of
lemonade. Behind it were seven rocking chairs for the clergy, and
just in front, two hard wooden chairs for the candidates.
The present local pastor, Brother Dinger, was a meager man,
slow of speech and given to long prayers. He rapped on the table.
“We will, uh, we will now begin.”
. . . Elmer, looking handsome on a kitchen chair in front of the
rows of flushed hot faces. He stopped fretting that his shiny new
black shoes were dust-gray. His heart pounded. He was in for it! No
escape! He was going to be a pastor! Last chance for Jim Lefferts,
and Lord knew where Jim was. He couldn’t— His shoulder muscles
were rigid. Then they relaxed wearily, as though he had struggled to
satiety, while Brother Dinger went on:
“Well, we’ll start with the usual, uh, examination of our young
brothers, and the brethren have, uh, they’ve been good enough, uh,
to let me, uh, in whose charge one, uh, one of these fine young
brothers has always lived and made his home—to let me, uh, let me
ask the questions. Now, Brother Gantry, do you believe fully and
whole-heartedly in baptism by immersion?”
Elmer was thinking, “What a rotten pulpit voice the poor duck
has,” but aloud he was rumbling:
“I believe, Brother, and I’ve been taught, that possibly a man
might be saved if he’d just been baptized by sprinkling or pouring,
but only if he were ignorant of the truth. Of course immersion is the
only Scriptural way—if we’re really going to be like Christ, we must
be buried with him in baptism.”
“That’s fine, Brother Gantry. Praise God! Now, Brother Fislinger,
do you believe in the final perseverance of the saints?”
Eddie’s eager but cracked voice explaining—on—on—
somniferous as the locusts in the blazing fields across the Kayooska
River.
As there is no hierarchy in the Baptist Church, but only a free
association of like-minded local churches, so are there no canonical
forms of procedure, but only customs. The ceremony of ordination is
not a definite rite; it may vary as the local associations will, and
ordination is conferred not by any bishop but by the general approval
of the churches in an association.
The questions were followed by the “charge to the candidates,” a
tremendous discourse by the great Dr. Ingle, in which he
commended study, light meals, and helping the sick by going and
reading texts to them. Every one joined then in a tremendous
basket-lunch on long plank tables by the cool river . . . banana layer
cake, doughnuts, fried chicken, chocolate layer cake, scalloped
potatoes, hermit cookies, cocoanut layer cake, pickled tomato
preserves, on plates which skidded about the table, with coffee
poured into saucerless cups from a vast tin pot, inevitably scalding at
least one child, who howled. There were hearty shouts of “Pass the
lemon pie, Sister Skiff,” and “That was a fine discourse of Brother
Ingle’s,” and “Oh, dear, I dropped my spoon and an ant got on it—
well, I’ll just wipe it on my apron—that was fine the way Brother
Gantry explained how the Baptist Church has existed ever since
Bible days.” . . . Boys bathing, shrieking, splashing one another. . . .
Boys getting into the poison ivy. . . . Boys becoming so infected with
the poison ivy that they would turn spotty and begin to swell within
seven hours. . . . Dr. Ingle enthusiastically telling the other clergy of
his trip to the Holy Land. . . . Elmer lying about his fondness for the
faculty of his theological seminary.
Reassembled after lunch, Brother Tusker, minister of the largest
congregation in the association, gave the “charge to the churches.”
This was always the juicest and most scandalous and delightful part
of the ordination ceremony. In it the clergy had a chance to get back
at the parishioners who, as large contributors, as guaranteed saints,
had all year been nagging them.
Here were these fine young men going into the ministry, said
Brother Tusker. Well, it was up to them to help. Brother Gantry and
Brother Fislinger were leaping with the joy of sacrifice and learning.
Then let the churches give ’em a chance, and not make ’em spend
all the time hot-footing it around, as some older preachers had to do,
raising their own salaries! Let folks quit criticizing; let ’em appreciate
godly lives and the quickening word once in a while, instead of ham-
ham-hammering their preachers all day long!
And certain of the parties who criticized the preachers’ wives for
idleness—funny the way some of them seemed to have so much
time to gad around and notice things and spread scandal! T’wa’n’t
only the menfolks that the Savior was thinking of when he talked
about them that were without sin being the only folks that were
qualified to heave any rocks!
The other preachers leaned back in their chairs and tried to look
casual, and hoped that Brother Tusker was going to bear down even
a lee-tle heavier on that matter of raising salaries.
In his sermon and the concluding ordination prayer Brother
Knoblaugh (of Barkinsville) summed up, for the benefit of Elmer
Gantry, Eddie Fislinger, and God, the history of the Baptists, the
importance of missions, and the perils of not reading the Bible before
breakfast daily.
Through this long prayer, the visiting pastors stood with their
hands on the heads of Elmer and Eddie.
There was a grotesque hitch at first. Most of the ministers were
little men who could no more than reach up to Elmer’s head. They
stood strained and awkward and unecclesiastical, these shabby
good men, before the restless audience. There was a giggle. Elmer
had a dramatic flash. He knelt abruptly, and Eddie, peering and
awkward, followed him.
In the powdery gray dust Elmer knelt, ignoring it. On his head
were the worn hands of three veteran preachers, and suddenly he
was humble, for a moment he was veritably being ordained to the
priestly service of God.
He had been only impatient till this instant. In the chapels at
Mizpah and Terwillinger he had heard too many famous visiting
pulpiteers to be impressed by the rustic eloquence of the Kayooska
Association. But he felt now their diffident tenderness, their
unlettered fervor—these poverty-twisted parsons who believed,
patient in their bare and baking tabernacles, that they were saving
the world, and who wistfully welcomed the youths that they
themselves had been.
For the first time in weeks Elmer prayed not as an exhibition but
sincerely, passionately, savoring righteousness:
“Dear God—I’ll get down to it—not show off but just think of thee
—do good—God help me!”
Coolness fluttered the heavy dust-caked leaves, and as the
sighing crowd creaked up from their benches, Elmer Gantry stood
confident . . . ordained minister of the gospel.
CHAPTER VI
I
the state of Winnemac lies between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and
in Winnemac, perhaps a hundred miles south of the city of Zenith, is
Babylon, a town which suggests New England more than the Middle
West. Large elms shade it, there are white pillars beyond lilac
bushes, and round about the town is a serenity unknown on the
gusty prairies.
Here is Mizpah Theological Seminary, of the Northern Baptists.
(There is a Northern and Southern convention of this distinguished
denomination, because before the Civil War the Northern Baptists
proved by the Bible, unanswerably, that slavery was wrong; and the
Southern Baptists proved by the Bible, irrefutably, that slavery was
the will of God.)
The three buildings of the seminary are attractive: brick with white
cupolas, green blinds at the small-paned wide windows. But within
they are bare, with hand-rubbings along the plaster walls, with
portraits of missionaries and ragged volumes of sermons.
The large structure is the dormitory, Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall—
known to the less reverent as Smut Hall.
Here lived Elmer Gantry, now ordained but completing the last
year of work for his Bachelor of Divinity degree, a commodity of
value in bargaining with the larger churches.
There were only sixteen left now of his original class of thirty-five.
The others had dropped out, for rural preaching, life insurance, or a
melancholy return to plowing. There was no one with whom he
wanted to live, and he dwelt sulkily in a single room, with a cot, a
Bible, a portrait of his mother, and with a copy of “What a Young Man
Ought to Know,” concealed inside his one starched pulpit shirt.
He disliked most of his class. They were too rustic or too pious,
too inquisitive about his monthly trips to the city of Monarch or simply
too dull. Elmer liked the company of what he regarded as intellectual
people. He never understood what they were saying, but to hear
them saying it made him feel superior.
The group which he most frequented gathered in the room of
Frank Shallard and Don Pickens, the large corner room on the
second floor of Smut Hall.
It was not an esthetic room. Though Frank Shallard might have
come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been
trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art
which “presented a message,” to regard “Les Miserables” as
superior because the bishop was a kind man, and “The Scarlet
Letter” as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author
didn’t mind.
The walls were of old plaster, cracked and turned deathly gray,
marked with the blood of mosquitoes and bed-bugs slain in
portentous battles long ago by theologians now gone forth to bestow
their thus uplifted visions on a materialistic world. The bed was a
skeleton of rusty iron bars, sagging in the center, with a comforter
which was not too clean. Trunks were in the corners, and the
wardrobe was a row of hooks behind a calico curtain. The grass
matting was slowly dividing into separate strands, and under the
study table it had been scuffed through to the cheap pine flooring.
The only pictures were Frank’s steel engraving of Roger
Williams, his framed and pansy-painted copy of “Pippa Passes,” and
Don Pickens’ favorite, a country church by winter moonlight, with
tinsel snow, which sparkled delightfully. The only untheological books
were Frank’s poets: Wordsworth, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, in
standard volumes, fine-printed and dismal, and one really dangerous
papist document, his “Imitation of Christ,” about which there was
argument at least once a week.
In this room, squatting on straight chairs, the trunks, and the bed,
on a November evening in 1905, were five young men besides
Elmer and Eddie Fislinger. Eddie did not really belong to the group,
but he persisted in following Elmer, feeling that not even yet was
everything quite right with the brother.
“A preacher has got to be just as husky and pack just as good a
wallop as a prize-fighter. He ought to be able to throw out any
roughneck that tries to interrupt his meetings, and still more, strength
makes such a hit with the women in his congregation—of course I
don’t mean it in any wrong way,” said Wallace Umstead.
Wallace was a student-instructor, head of the minute seminary
gymnasium and “director of physical culture”; a young man who had
a military mustache and who did brisk things on horizontal bars. He
was a state university B. A. and graduate of a physical-training
school. He was going into Y. M. C. A. work when he should have a
divinity degree, and he was fond of saying, “Oh, I’m still one of the
Boys, you know, even if I am a prof.”
“That’s right,” agreed Elmer Gantry. “Say, I had—I was holding a
meeting at Grauten, Kansas, last summer, and there was a big boob
that kept interrupting, so I just jumped down from the platform and
went up to him, and he says, ‘Say, Parson,’ he says, ‘can you tell us
what the Almighty wants us to do about prohibition, considering he
told Paul to take some wine for his stomach’s sake?’ ‘I don’t know as
I can,’ I says, ‘but you want to remember he also commanded us to
cast out devils!’ and I yanked that yahoo out of his seat and threw
him out on his ear, and say, the whole crowd—well, there weren’t so
awfully many there, but they certainly did give him the ha-ha! You
bet. And to be a husky makes a hit with the whole congregation,
men’s well as women. Bet there’s more’n one high-toned preacher
that got his pulpit because the deacons felt he could lick ’em. Of
course praying and all that is all O. K., but you got to be practical!
We’re here to do good, but first you have to cinch a job that you can
do good in!”
“You’re commercial!” protested Eddie Fislinger, and Frank
Shallard: “Good heavens, Gantry, is that all your religion means to
you?”
“Besides,” said Horace Carp, “you have the wrong angle. It isn’t
mere brute force that appeals to women—to congregations. It’s a
beautiful voice. I don’t envy you your bulk, Elmer—besides, you’re
going to get fat—”
“I am like hell!”
“—but what I could do with that voice of yours! I’d have ’em all
weeping! I’d read ’em poetry from the pulpit!”
Horace Carp was the one High Churchman in the Seminary. He
was a young man who resembled a water spaniel, who concealed
saints’ images, incense, and a long piece of scarlet brocade in his
room, and who wore a purple velvet smoking-jacket. He was always
raging because his father, a wholesale plumber and pious, had
threatened to kick him out if he went to an Episcopal seminary
instead of a Baptist fortress.
“Yes, you prob’ly would read ’em poetry!” said Elmer. “That’s the
trouble with you high-falutin’ guys. You think you can get people by a
lot of poetry and junk. What gets ’em and holds ’em and brings ’em
to their pews every Sunday is the straight gospel—and it don’t hurt
one bit to scare ’em into being righteous with the good old-fashioned
Hell!”
“You bet—providing you encourage ’em to keep their bodies in
swell shape, too,” condescended Wallace Umstead. “Well, I don’t
want to talk as a prof—after all I’m glad I can still remain just one of
the Boys—but you aren’t going to develop any very big horse-power
in your praying tomorrow morning if you don’t get your sleep. And
me to my little downy! G’night!”
At the closing of the door, Harry Zenz, the seminary iconoclast,
yawned, “Wallace is probably the finest slice of tripe in my wide
clerical experience. Thank God, he’s gone! Now we can be natural
and talk dirty!”
“And yet,” complained Frank Shallard, “you encourage him to
stay and talk about his pet methods of exercise! Don’t you ever tell
the truth, Harry?”
“Never carelessly. Why, you idiot, I want Wallace to run and let
the dean know what an earnest worker in the vineyard I am. Frank,
you’re a poor innocent. I suspect you actually believe some of the
dope they teach us here. And yet you’re a man of some reading.
You’re the only person in Mizpah except myself who could
appreciate a paragraph of Huxley. Lord, how I pity you when you get
into the ministry! Of course, Fislinger here is a grocery clerk, Elmer is
a ward politician, Horace is a dancing master—”
He was drowned beneath a surf of protests, not too jocose and
friendly.
Harry Zenz was older than the others—thirty-two at least. He was
plump, almost completely bald, and fond of sitting still; and he could
look profoundly stupid. He was a man of ill-assorted but astonishing
knowledge; and in the church ten miles from Mizpah which he had
regularly supplied for two years he was considered a man of
humorless learning and bloodless piety. He was a complete and
cheerful atheist, but he admitted it only to Elmer Gantry and Horace
Carp. Elmer regarded him as a sort of Jim Lefferts, but he was as
different from Jim as pork fat from a crystal. He hid his giggling
atheism—Jim flourished his; he despised women—Jim had a
disillusioned pity for the Juanita Klauzels of the world; he had an
intellect—Jim had only cynical guesses.
Zenz interrupted their protests:
“So you’re a bunch of Erasmuses! You ought to know. And there’s
no hypocrisy in what we teach and preach! We’re a specially
selected group of Parsifals—beautiful to the eye and stirring to the
ear and overflowing with knowledge of what God said to the Holy
Ghost in camera at 9:16 last Wednesday morning. We’re all just
rarin’ to go out and preach the precious Baptist doctrine of ‘Get
ducked or duck.’ We’re wonders. We admit it. And people actually sit
and listen to us, and don’t choke! I suppose they’re overwhelmed by
our nerve! And we have to have nerve, or we’d never dare to stand
in a pulpit again. We’d quit, and pray God to forgive us for having
stood up there and pretended that we represent God, and that we
can explain what we ourselves say are the unexplainable mysteries!
But I still claim that there are preachers who haven’t our holiness.
Why is it that the clergy are so given to sex crimes?”
“That’s not true!” from Eddie Fislinger.
“Don’t talk that way!” Don Pickens begged. Don was Frank’s
roommate: a slight youth, so gentle, so affectionate, that even that
raging lion of righteousness, Dean Trosper, was moved to spare him.
Harry Zenz patted his arm. “Oh, you, Don—you’ll always be a
monk. But if you don’t believe it, Fislinger, look at the statistics of the
five thousand odd crimes committed by clergymen—that is those
who got caught—since the eighties, and note the percentage of sex
offenses—rape, incest, bigamy, enticing young girls—oh, a lovely
record!”
Elmer was yawning, “Oh, God, I do get so sick of you fellows
yammering and arguing and discussing. All perfectly simple—maybe
we preachers aren’t perfect; don’t pretend to be; but we do a lot of
good.”
“That’s right,” said Eddie. “But maybe it is true that—The snares
of sex are so dreadful that even ministers of the gospel get trapped.
And the perfectly simple solution is continence—just take it out in
prayer and good hard exercise.”
“Oh, sure, Eddie, you bet; what a help you’re going to be to the
young men in your church,” purred Harry Zenz.
Frank Shallard was meditating unhappily. “Just why are we going
to be preachers, anyway? Why are you, Harry, if you think we’re all
such liars?”
“Oh, not liars, Frank—just practical, as Elmer put it. Me, it’s easy.
I’m not ambitious. I don’t want money enough to hustle for it. I like to
sit and read. I like intellectual acrobatics and no work. And you can
have all that in the ministry—unless you’re one of these chumps that
get up big institutional outfits and work themselves to death for
publicity.”
“You certainly have a fine high view of the ministry!” growled
Elmer.
“Well, all right, what’s your fine high purpose in becoming a Man
of God, Brother Gantry?”
“Well, I— Rats, it’s perfectly clear. Preacher can do a lot of good
—give help and— And explain religion.”
“I wish you’d explain it to me! Especially I want to know to what
extent are Christian symbols descended from indecent barbaric
symbols?”
“Oh, you make me tired!”
Horace Carp fluttered, “Of course none of you consecrated
windjammers ever think of the one raison d’être of the church, which
is to add beauty to the barren lives of the common people!”
“Yeh! It certainly must make the common people feel awfully
common to hear Brother Gantry spiel about the errors of
supralapsarianism!”
“I never preach about any such a doggone thing!” Elmer
protested. “I just give ’em a good helpful sermon, with some jokes
sprinkled in to make it interesting and some stuff about the theater or
something that’ll startle ’em a little and wake ’em up and help ’em to
lead better and fuller daily lives.”
“Oh, do you, dearie!” said Zenz. “My error. I thought you probably
gave ’em a lot of helpful hints about the innascibilitas attribute and
the res sacramenti. Well, Frank, why did you become a theologue?”
“I can’t tell you when you put it sneeringly. I believe there are
mystic experiences which you can follow only if you are truly set
apart.”
“Well, I know why I came here,” said Don Pickens. “My dad sent
me!”
“So did mine!” complained Horace Carp. “But what I can’t
understand is: Why are any of us in an ole Baptist school? Horrible
denomination—all these moldly barns of churches, and people
coughing illiterate hymns, and long-winded preachers always
springing a bright new idea like ‘All the world needs to solve its
problems is to get back to the gospel of Jesus Christ.’ The only
church is the Episcopal! Music! Vestments! Stately prayers! Lovely
architecture! Dignity! Authority! Believe me, as soon as I can make
the break, I’m going to switch over to the Episcopalians. And then I’ll
have a social position, and be able to marry a nice rich girl.”
“No, you’re wrong,” said Zenz. “The Baptist Church is the only
denomination worth while, except possibly the Methodist.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” marveled Eddie.
“Because the Baptists and the Methodists have all the
numbskulls—except those that belong to the Catholic Church and
the henhouse sects—and so even you, Horace, can get away with
being a prophet. There are some intelligent people in the Episcopal
and Congregational Churches, and a few of the Campbellite flocks,
and they check up on you. Of course all Presbyterians are half-wits,

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Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts xi

Posthuman Postscript: Poems more Durable than Brass 407

Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts

Aen. Virgil, Aeneid

‘I f a man should prosecute as much as could be said of everything, his

way in which clones are represented in popular fiction, through arguments

reading.2 Since writers have often imitated authors in different languages

subject is so rich. It is an agent of historical change and transformation

(vis); he compares the skill of the imitator implicitly and explicitly to

5. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), fol. 281v.

This metaphorical opposition—which connects the start of this history

component in the conception of what an author should do.8 Imitators were

manners and customs of Roman authors into vernacular equivalents—an

be a serious betrayal of the intertextual method’.12 ‘Allege’ and ‘proof ’ in this

what experimental psychologists term ‘imitation’, in which the mannerisms

about an author as akin to a ‘genre’ or series of poems with shared features

writing were (and remain) mutually enforcing activities, I have tended to

century bc can worry about whether he is a ‘thief ’ when he imitates plays

In the chapters after Milton I turn to vernacular texts, and in particular

public highways—subsist alongside proprietorial spaces over which other

countries that have dominated them or which they have dominated.

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Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts xi

Posthuman Postscript: Poems more Durable than Brass 407