Sublime

Most of the time, all I was doing was imitating my favorite authors, anyhow. I went through a Hemingway stage (who doesn’t?), but I also went through a pretty serious Annie Proulx stage and a rather embarrassing Cormac McCarthy stage. But that’s what you have to do at the beginning; everybody imitates before they can innovate.

Emulating is a form of copying not the letter but the spirit of something.

The mimetic theory is first and foremost a theory of religion. It describes the “religious” dimension of interpersonal relations—the idolatry of models or sexual partners—just as it explains the origins of archaic religions and the qualitative difference between these and the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Whyte: You start with imitation because you don’t know how to do this [produce a poem]. These poets are doing astonishing things. So you find the ones you love—there’s absolutely nothing wrong with writing pieces that are pure Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney or Rilke—and you just keep writing your way into your own voice. Eventually, you realize that y

“The principal source of violence between human beings is mimetic rivalry, the rivalry resulting from imitation of a model who becomes a rival or of a rival who becomes a model”

Imitation is not a strategy. Differentiation is.

The theoretical framework for this outline history of poetry is provided by the first three chapters, which construct a matrix of three different ways in which poems can be distinguished from other kinds of imitation and from each other – in terms of their medium, object and mode.