to oneself some hero, not to imitate but to be surpassed’, he writes. Gracián
points the reader to ancient examples of greatness, living texts of renown, for
nothing so incites ambition within the spirit as the trumpeting of another’sfame:
‘Nothing inspires more ambition than the fame of another’s reputation. That
which stifles envy gives breath to courage.’^18 Imitation then is not only a literary
exercise but a habit of thought, a way of life, and a way forward and upward to
the good, honorable life at that. This synthesis (of imitation and invention) calls
to mind the humanist Petrarch’s important work on illustrious men. As with so
many of Petrarch’s projects, this one soon found its equivalent in early Tudor
England in a grand, ambitious compilation of a nation’s legendary and histor-
icalfigures by John Leyland, who insisted on being called‘the Antiquarian’.He
neverfinished the work with the working titleViris illustribus, and went mad
from his endless research and writing, a warning to all of us, I suppose, not to
emulate his efforts too closely.
Imitation, as I briefly mentioned earlier, is alive and well among poets
today. For example, David Ferry, one of American poetry’s best translators
ofGilgamesh, Horace, and Virgil, is working on a version of Virgil’sAeneid
right now. Ferry is what I might call a‘revoicer’. In his recent collection
Bewilderment, which won a national book award, Ferry translates ancient
Greek poetry, and also writes his own poems about themes ancient and
modern.^19 His work demonstrates that the old humanistic tradition of imita-
tionasinnovation is still alive. Just recently, fellow poet and critic Dan Kiasan
refers to this imitation, or applicatory translation, as theft:‘Poetry is innately
related to theft; the lyre was invented, the Greeks tell us, by Hermes who then
gave the instrument to Apollo as compensation for stealing cattle.’Kiasan
continues,‘One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into
strong annoyance or even resentment is that poems steal our very language out
from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable.’^20
Poetry takes our common speech and makes it suffer a sea change into
something rich and strange. This is a fairly standard operating procedure
among poets, although Robert Frost in one notebook entry seems rueful about
unintentional imitation:‘Pity, some would say, to think a thing out, only to
find that Plato or St. Thomas had thought it out before.’^21 As we will see, these
different modes of motivations for imitation are often employed for the sake of
reflecting present circumstances and for giving a proven form to personal
(^18) Baltasar Gracián y Morales,The Courtiers Manual Oracle, or The Art of Prudence(London:
M. Flesher, 1685), 76.
(^19) David Ferry,Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations(Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2012).
(^20) Dan Chiasson,‘David Ferry’s Beautiful Thefts’,New Yorker, 9 January 2013, http://www.
newyorker.com/books/page-turner/david-ferrys-beautiful-thefts, accessed 13 February 2016.
(^21) Robert Frost,The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen (Harvard and Cambridge,
MA; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 465.
Christian Humanism’s Legacy in Renaissance Poetry 179