Reading & Composition

Imitatio, the Latin word for “imitation,” was an important literary and rhetorical principle in ancient Rome. In his “Institutes of Oratory,” Quintillian explains the importance of imitatio: “a great portion of art consists in imitation, since, though to invent was first in order of time and holds the first place in merit, it is of advantage to copy what has been invented with success.” To learn to speak well, one had to train oneself by imitating more accomplished orators. In the Renaissance, imitatio was taken up as a pedagogical tool, and students and scholars painstakingly copied and mimicked ancient writings in order to become great stylists themselves. In this class, “imitation” will bring together three different strands of study. In the first place, an introduction to poetry, one of the most fertile grounds of imitation. Taking the classical period (primarily in Latin), the continental Renaissance, the Romantic period and the contemporary periods as our touchstones, we will trace the most important poetic forms – the sonnet, the epic, the ode, and free verse – through the poetic tradition, seeing how writers imitated each other. In order to understand historical practices of writerly imitation, but also to understand poetry from the inside out, we will write our own imitations of the poets we read for class. This writing practice will transition nicely with the second goal of the class, to acquaint students with the skills necessary for researching and writing academic papers. Thirdly, we will take a broad view of imitatio, looking at the ways imitation has been an important practice in religion (“imitatio christi,” for example), art (schools of painters, fakes), and contemporary culture (plagiarism, lip-syncing, Elvis impersonators).

Readings will include selections from the following authors and works:

Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance, A Poetry Handbook, Gordon Braden, Petrarchism; Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ; Aristotle, Poetics;Quintillian, Institutes of Oratory, and poems by Bishop, Celan, Collins, Dickinson, Donne, Emerson, Gongora, H.D., Hopkins, Horace, Jonson, Keats, Lucretius, MacLeish, Mallarmé, Millay, Milton, Moore, Petrarch, Pope, Pound, Quevedo, Rilke, Rimbaud, Sexton, Shakespeare, Shelley, Sidney, Spenser, Stevens, Tennyson, Valéry, Verlaine Virgil, Whitman, Wyatt, and Yeats.