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

Abstract

Recent work in psychology has postulated a role for imitation in such diverse aspects of cognition and human development as self-recognition, acquisition of linguistic and moral systems, and even Theory of Mind—or how we learn that other people have minds that work similarly to our own. Current theories of cultural evolution in anthropology are based largely upon imitation.1 While there are still active arguments on the exact role of imitation and the extent of its influence on human development—much of them depending on how broadly the term is defined—it is becoming increasingly clear that imitation is a fundamental aspect of the human mind and therefore influences the products of that mind, including literature (in the broad sense of any linguistic, structured artifact) and the other arts.This conclusion should be of great moment to the study of any sort of artistic work, not only because, for instance, literature is a product of the human mind and therefore must be influenced by the way it functions (while not being strictly reducible to it), but also because of the millennia-long history of the study of imitation and the arts, including mimesis in Plato and Aristotle; Seneca's, Horace's, Cicero's and especially Quintilian's theories of imitation; and the Renaissance practice of imitatio, or heuristic imitation of literary models. Work on imitation emerging from psychology and anthropology allows us to bridge these rhetorical and cognitive approaches and to see imitation in an even broader light—as not just a means of composition, although it certainly is, but more fundamentally as an inherent aspect of all literary/cultural production that emerges out of an innate mental faculty (or collection of them).Encompassing a broad range of disciplines and potentially large swathes of cultural history, a full study of literary imitation from an evolutionary/cognitive perspective is far too great an undertaking for the scope of a single work. It is thus useful either to focus on a particular use of imitation as expressed across multiple authors and cultural contexts or to expand the methodology to broader aspects of imitation, but concentrate on the work of a single author. Here I have chosen the second path, focusing on the poetry of Ezra Pound. Pound's work makes for a productive place to study imitation for two primary reasons. First of all, poetry, as formed language, supplies more concrete examples for examining in detail the transformations and alterations inherent in imitation and consequently the uses to which it is put. Lines can be counted, syllables and stresses tallied, rhyme schemes compared, and word usages weighed. While prosaic forms can be imported and borrowed readily, it is more difficult to speak of the “imitation” of a novel or short story in a detailed, concrete, and extended manner; there is a scope beyond which the tools I wish to put into use here are too finely focused. At the very least, lyric provides a more immediately productive place to develop this new methodology.The second reason is that imitation, both broadly and narrowly conceived, is central to Pound's poetry, and his work covers many aspects of literary imitation from translation to mimicry to emulation to adaptation and all the shades of gray in between. Imitation broadly conceived in Pound's work, as in any poet's, forms a spectrum. The furthest extreme of fidelity, obviously, is pure copying (although even copying can lead to mistakes and changes). Moving along the spectrum we have translation in the literal sense of “carrying over” denotative meaning from one language to another. This blends into mimicry, which aims to reproduce primarily the external and formal aspects of a work. In the center is imitation in the narrow sense, which revives a source text at the same time that it remains an autonomous work in its own right; it shows more transformation and originality than does translation or mimicry but is textually closer to its source than are our next modes. Next comes emulation, or the attempt to create the same literary effect through different linguistic or formal means. Getting toward the other extreme is adaptation, which uses a source text only as an initial conceit and innovates beyond it, leaving one aspect of the source intact while significantly altering others or introducing entirely new elements. Finally, the other extreme is innovation, but even this does not totally leave behind concerns of imitation, intertextuality, or influence. Because Pound's imitations are so copious, it is possible to examine in his work not just imitation as a general concept but also specific kinds of imitation and their relationship both with the rest of Pound's oeuvre and his place in literary history. However, the focus on Pound is intended primarily as a specific example of the broader approach to literary affiliation sketched out here.In Pound's case, the contribution of imitation to individual poems as well as to his greater lyric goals is more evident than for many other poets. Through the successive imitation of chosen models, Pound takes into himself the foreign elements he deems valuable and, in so doing, attempts to import those same values into the English lyric tradition. Imitation, for Pound, is the means of producing both a tradition and an individual poetic persona. He admits as much in these oft-quoted lines from “Histrion”: “Thus am I Dante for a space and am / One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief, / Or am such holy ones I may not write” (Poems and Translations 80). The standard argument for Pound's voluminous translation activity, from languages that include Latin, Italian, French, Provençal, and Chinese, is that each poet he translated was a single mask (the “personae” of his 1909 collection and the 1926 Collected Poems). The Cantos is productively, though not exclusively, read as a series of historical personae whose juxtapositions map onto the present.If current researchers, including Philippe Rochat, Andrew Meltzoff, and Jean Decety, are even partially correct, imitation is a foundation on which many of our most fundamentally human mental features are built, among them self-reflection and self-recognition (Rochat), “interpersonal affiliation” (Kinsbourne), language acquisition (Nadel) and even Theory of Mind (Meltzoff and Decety). It is an innate faculty present, at least in a rudimentary form, from birth (Meltzoff) and develops continuously until roughly nine months to a year when children become “imitation machines” until three years of age (Tomasello 52, 159). The questions before us, then, are whether this view of imitation as a fundamental cognitive process can shed light on acts of cultural, specifically literary, imitation on the level either of individual artists or of broader cultural trends and, if so, how. Voluminous work in several different fields leads to a positive conclusion to the first and easier of these questions. The task is to examine how such a universal, evolved, psychological mechanism exerts influence on cultural products, including poetry.2 What is clear is that such an approach will not wholly replace current approaches to literary texts but is ideally more useful in putting current approaches on a firmer footing because they are based on a sound theory of human nature.3Take as an example the issue of influence. Harold Bloom's theories of poetic misprision have not surprisingly played a major role in the scholarship surrounding Pound's poetic encounters with other English poets. Pound's rewriting and intertextual elbowing out of his precursors, Robert Browning chief among them, is almost a textbook case of influence. As antidote or corrective to this, however, several scholars have postulated that the “anxiety of influence” breaks down in the process of translation. George Bornstein states that “poets who wrote in a different language can liberate later poets from the intimidations of their own immediate predecessors in their own language” (8), while Reed Way Dasenbrock says, “The unanxious acts of imitation studied in this book should demonstrate that Bloom's system breaks down in the face of genuine multilingualism” (9). I do not disagree with these statements so much as I wish to place them within the way of looking at imitation I am establishing here, which makes “anxious” and “unanxious” imitation just two stops on the same spectrum. On the one hand the process of translation, or of cross-language imitation, can be a freeing action for the “ephebe,” or beginning poet, simply because, as writing in another language, it is no longer possible to use the same words as the model, hence a process of revision and interpretation is necessary in order to produce a text in the target language. But this necessity can in fact be one of its attractions and does not remove the anxiety of influence so much as facilitate the transformative process of influence and make it more of a creative process than a “defensive” one.This becomes clearer if we view influence as a spectrum, as we are doing with imitation. Just as I have postulated that translation, imitation, emulation, and innovation are not distinct categories but compose a continuum along which all poetic works fall, so influence is not an all-or-nothing proposition. As Bloom tells us, influence is pervasive and, as he says in A Map of Misreading, misprision, or creative misreading, is “how meaning is produced in Post-Enlightenment strong poetry” (80). But Bloom's contrast between strong poetry and weak, between “strong poet” and simple ephebe, as well as between post- and pre-Enlightenment poetry, is too clear-cut. By postulating a Freudian basis for the act of misprision as a defense against the lyric forefathers and a metaphoric murdering of them, he sets up a stark competition: strong or weak, victor or victim. Folding misprision into the idea of imitation, Bloom's statement is perfectly correct in that certain Romantic and post-Romantic poets have foregrounded a specific kind of imitation—the kind that pretends not to be—but it can be applied far more generally, to the pre-Enlightenment period and to “weaker” poets as well, provided that we look for the right form of imitation, or right degree of misprision.Poetry, taken on the level of genre, individual poet, or single poem, presents many shades of gray between the original and the stolen, the invented and the copied. Influence, just like imitation, is often viewed as a source of immature or unoriginal work, as in the literary history chestnut that so-and-so's early work “betrays” the influence of said important poet, or as a psychic struggle taking place subconsciously. All poetry is on some level appropriation; as Bakhtin has said of the novel (293), poets always speak through the words of other poets. Imitation, emulation, and influence are the foundation upon which poetry is written. Viewing influence as a form of imitation, complete with all the cognitive baggage I am including here—lets us see it as a means to innovation and originality and as an active, conscious process of incorporating, adapting, and rewriting a precursor's work. Furthermore, it can be analyzed with the same tools as imitation and should be subject to the same psychological proclivities (when, whom, and how to imitate).Poets are certainly influenced; indeed a poet could not exist without at least the influence to write poetry in the first place (Bloom 75). The study of influence has led to an enormous amount of detailed readings and comparisons of individual poems but by itself is unmoored and adrift from broader questions such as why influence should be so predominant or even why poets should be influenced at all—excepting of course the use of psychoanalytic thought and the Freudian family romance, which are themselves unmoored from a broader, experimentally corroborated theory of human nature. It is by folding the idea of influence into the idea of imitation that we can ground it in the workings of the human mind and gain a practical model for literary production.This, I argue, gets at what this approach can contribute to Pound studies, and even to the broader study of poetry. It provides a way of discussing influence and intertextuality in a way that is grounded in an embodied (and encultured) concept of the self while not denying the power that texts themselves possess as models to be imitated. This approach can be seen as bridging the two predominant trends noted by Bornstein (3): the French-influenced study of intertextuality, which focuses more on culture as an autonomous force and the freeplay of signifiers, and the “Anglo-American” study of influence that emphasizes tradition. On the one hand my model recognizes that authors are not dead4 and that texts are not unmoored memes but are selected, modified, recombined, and created by human beings with distinct psychological proclivities who act within a broader historical context. Furthermore it allows for a way in which both cultural and socio-historical elements can influence a poet's creative personality. On the other hand it recognizes that “influence” is not a broad enough category to account for the complexity of cultural evolution and replaces Sophocles's Greek drama with Darwin's evolutionary drama.The available scholarship has developed very sensitive tools for discussing texts and for discussing poets but is weak in discussing how exactly poets interact with texts. Even exemplary studies beg the question of the true nature of imitation. For instance, Hugh Kenner's magisterial The Pound Era works on the assumption that “that is how the past exists, phantasmagoric weskits, stray words, random things recorded. The imagination augments, metabolizes, feeding on all it has to feed on, such scraps” (5). There is some truth to this, but not all tradition comes to us as stray pieces of parchment and the mind is much less of a bricoleur than this would suggest. The formation of a tradition certainly involves selection, but that process of selection, amalgamation, and transformation is carried out according to its own rules in interaction with an individual personality within a certain cultural and social context.5 Other studies view tradition too monolithically; or they ignore the factors that go into selecting models to adapt but merely start with the choice as a given. The study of imitation, grounded as it is in both the personal and social aspects of psychology, can begin to account for (explain would be too strong a word) the manifold elements that contribute to influence.It should also be pointed out that despite the newfangled sheen of such an approach with its references to fMRIs and brain anatomy, this approach to imitation is compatible with classical and, especially, Renaissance approaches to imitation. Renaissance imitatio is structured around a similar process of model evaluation and selection followed by transformation and recombination of source material.6 Sicari's point, despite a slightly different emphasis, is entirely apropos: “In fact, the modernist humanism of the Men of 1914 [Joyce, Lewis, Pound, and Eliot] can be regarded as a reconstituted Christian modernism in the spirit of the early modern humanists” (11). I can only imagine that such a confluence of the modern and the ancient would have pleased Pound.My psychology-based approach toward imitation has two main elements to it, a division of labor reflected in the structure of the following pages: the abstract theoretical approach based on interdisciplinary research and the concrete examination of texts that brings in more “standard” humanistic approaches. First, I will address the broader issues related to imitation as a product of innate, evolved faculties. This element can help answer fundamental theoretical questions, but has a more limited capacity to address the details of specific literary texts. Second, I will sketch out an approach that combines traditional influence and translation studies to examine the exact process and transformation—and imitation, like translation, is always a transformation—that source texts undergo in the process of imitation. This combination permits a reading of a poetic text that can deal with both its formal and intertextual elements as well as its role in the creative process and literary history more broadly.A further question is how well the concept of imitation as I am using it applies beyond the individual poem or poet, on the level of literary tradition. The imitative process begins with the perception of other poets or texts and the selection of appropriate models. This in itself can be complex. The choice of whom to imitate is not random. Anthropologists speak of two general algorithms. The first is frequency based: “Copy what everyone else is doing.” The second is model based: “Copy what those with high status are doing” (Richerson and Boyd 69). These two need not be terribly different, especially if everyone else is copying those with high status; however, that will eventually lead to a shift in what is considered “high status” (the common having less status). To these are added “Copy what one likes”—a “content-based bias” (69). Copying by status or preference, however, only raises the questions of why certain things give status or why one prefers certain things over others. One is tempted to relegate such issues to the exigencies of individual development and random chance and assume they are unknowable (this would be a corollary of the so-called intentional fallacy),7 except such things cannot be entirely random or there would not be enough consensus across a population to form such things as artistic movements, trends, and even fads. The metronome-like back-and-forth of literary history points to the existence of some constellation of causes, if not to the causes themselves. After all, the similarities within a given movement, particularly when speaking across national and linguistic boundaries, must be communicated in some fashion. Imitation, I propose, is the means for this transmission.The poet's choice of models, then, should take place under the sway of certain psychological or cognitive proclivities operating within a given cultural environment, including tradition, society, history, personal experience, and education. A “status bias”8 will push authors to imitate models imitated by other poets, or taught to them in school, or those that are granted high status through publication, anthologization, or professional advancement. This same bias will push authors, particularly young ones, to stop imitating poets or styles that have been imitated to the point of saturation—and hence are not novel and consequently less interesting—and to begin searching for new models and reevaluating the status of past authors. This period will correspond with what we retroactively designate as a transition period between styles, or the beginnings of a new literary movement.From these observations we can make a general hypothesis: types of imitation should be cyclical,9 oscillating between imitating accepted (generally domestic) models and imitating new (often foreign) models as authors seek out something new and then develop those new models until a level of habituation has set in and more new models must be sought out.10 A series of more specific, ideally testable, predictions come out of this statement. One is that with the change in type of imitation, and with the reversal of the literary pendulum, we should find an increase in the level of foreign influence, taking the form of increased translation and increased imitation of foreign models. Another, and this is often overlooked in the literary history books that often betray a form of Whig history in which the “winners” are inevitabilities, is that these periods should be more littered with false starts and poetic dead ends. Franco Moretti has recently predicted as much based on an evolutionary logic and has mustered some empirical evidence to support his claim (21–27).At this point it is useful to make a further distinction: while imitation in psychological studies is broadly conceived as the replication of either the actions or the intent of another individual, emulation refers more specifically to the copying of another's intent, the attempt to achieve the same goal as someone else only with different means. In terms of literature, we can define imitation as the use of another author's forms, tropes, or language. Emulation, on the other hand, can be defined as trying to achieve the same effect as another work using a different verbal or formal strategy. Imitation is new wine in an old bottle, while emulation is old wine in a new bottle. Along with the oscillation between which models are followed there should be a periodicity to imitation and emulation as accustomed methods and styles become hackneyed as a result of habituation. Once it becomes too difficult to reproduce a given effect with old means, authors will seek new styles and tropes to create the same effect. Indeed, I would predict that an oscillation between imitation narrowly defined and emulation would be seen if a broad enough study would be conducted.The exact dividing line between imitation and emulation as forms of literary production is hardly clear. A single poem can consist of elements that can be classified as both imitation and emulation, both of which often get classified under the rubric of translation. We can then assume that elements of imitation and emulation will both be present within a given period of literary history but that each will be used to a different end. Imitation can be used to import new tropes, styles, or forms into a tradition (such as the imitation of the sonnet in sixteenth-century England) while emulation can be used either to retrofit old tropes and forms for new purposes (such as Hopkins's invention of the curtal sonnet) or, less often, for creating new forms and combinations of tropes (as with Pushkin's sonnets in Eugene Onegin, which form a full-fledged novel in verse—a form later copied by Vikram Seth in The Golden Gate). It is rare, in fact well-nigh impossible, to find examples of pure innovation, of both new tropes and new forms together; old wine and new bottles or new bottles and old wine appear to be the general rules.These initial stages composed of various forms of imitation, while not entirely separable from innovation, are necessary for it. Innovation is just the furthest end of the spectrum I have been discussing, and it cannot exist without some process of imitation. This is true in the ethological and anthropological record where species that do not imitate do not innovate, and those that imitate more are more capable of innovation (Reader and Laland). Consequently, imitation is not a secondary activity but is rather primary in the sense that it must precede “original” creation.“A Girl,” published in Ripostes (1912), provides us with an example of an emulation, a poem in which the effect of another poem is reproduced by other means. Within the framework I am developing here, emulation becomes increasingly important as habituation sets in within a given style, since the same effect will no longer be produced through the same means, in the same way that a once-hot fashion trend becomes gaudy or a car alarm steadily blends into background noise. “A Girl” retells the myth of Daphne, a water nymph who asks her father to change her form in order to save her from the god Apollo, who is chasing her with lascivious intent. She is changed into the laurel tree, which Apollo then takes as his symbol. As Apollo is the god of music and lyric poetry, the laurel comes to represent poetic inspiration (hence poet laureate). The most famous telling of the story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, but it is also one of the major subtexts of Francis Petrarch's Canzoniere in part because of the pun on Petrarch's beloved Laura and lauro. Here is an excerpt from Book I of The Metamorphoses, a selection from canzone 23 of the Canzoniere—both of which Pound was intimately familiar with—and Pound's original poem:A GirlThe tree has entered my hands,The sap has ascended my arms,The tree has grown in my breast—Downward,The branches grow out of me, like arms.Tree you are,Moss you are,You are violets with wind above them.A child—so high—you are,And all this is folly to the world.(Poems and Translations 235)Pound's antagonism toward Virgil and Petrarch is well documented and he was not the type to balk at correcting what he saw as his predecessors’ mistakes, no matter how venerated they were.12 It should thus not be surprising to see that the stylistic differences between the poems are striking. For instance, instead of “a down-dragging numbness seized her limbs [torpor gravis occupat artus]” Pound simply writes, “Downward / The branches grow out of me, like arms” which reverses the motion of the sap in line 2: “The sap has ascended my arms.” The repetition of this last word paints the picture of the girl sprouting arms like branches, perhaps waving them in her terror at her transformation.Pound exhibits a mélange of both the Latin and Italian versions. The basic image is the same: a young girl is turned into a tree. Both use first-person narration, although Ovid uses Daphne's direct speech and Petrarch uses the myth of Daphne to speak of his own metaphorical transformation. Pound begins in the first person (from the point of view of the eponymous girl) and then switches to the second in the second stanza. This switch produces an effect more striking than that in either subtext. We experience the transformation from the inside as the tree grows out of her where Virgil begins with the outside, her skin turning to bark. Where Petrarch is verbose (nine lines, one sentence), Pound is spare; he selects the elements of the basic image that will have the most effect and does not water them down. What makes this poem an emulation is that the basic goal is the same: to describe Daphne's transformation and to then make a broader statement about poetry, although the formal, stylistic, and even syntactic means of achieving that goal are markedly different from those of either source text. One can also point to the lack of new life in this poem: it is still highly dependent on its sources. In fact, they are necessary to understand what Pound is trying to do, a dependency on its sources that places it closer to the “copy” end of the spectrum than to the “original” end.Where imitation in the narrow sense—much like the Renaissance practice of imitatio—revives its source text at the same time that it builds on it and establishes its own existence, emulation is often, as in this case, a stylistic exercise. The source text of an emulation is not transformed from within (as Daphne herself is) or reanimated in the way that Petrarch reanimates Virgil as a means of achieving his lyric goal of describing his own transformation. We should keep in mind Petrarch's broader cultural goal of reviving the classical world as a foundation for establishing a new tradition in the vernacular. We can discern in Pound's stylistic transformation of his sources the likely goals of the poem. In rewriting the Daphne myth Pound is not only trying to achieve the same goal but is trying to do it better; it is a stylistic exercise meant as a reproach against poets who did not do their job effectively. Despite his stated antipathy toward the Italian poet, Pound's ultimate goals are quite similar to Petrarch's, but as a stylistic exercise this poem is only a preparatory step.13 It is beyond a translation, but is not an imitation that is ultimately the currency of cultural evolution.The second stanza switches to second person. The girl evolves from a simple tree, as in Ovid, to nature more broadly, or at least other plants—tree, moss, and violets. This springlike quality makes her something of a Persephone figure for Pound and provides an additional resonance with the resuscitative powers of poetry and imitation. But the girl does not cease being a child (as the title suggests); the transformation is not total. And perhaps by virtue of this new dual existence, she has been raised to a higher level (“so high—you are”). We can resolve this by assuming that the transformation depicted so vividly in the first half of the poem is in fact an allegory for the girl's transformation into poetry, symbolized of course by the laurel. To take this one step further, the transformation is, as is the case in Petrarch and possibly Ovid, who transforms the original Greek myth,14 a representation of the transformation inherent in imitation: the girl is transformed into a tree and then into the laurel just as Ovid's lines are transformed into Petrarch's and then into Pound's poem. The Persephone element is indicative of her rebirth in poetry—and rebirth, particularly cultural rebirth, plays a great role in Pound's poetry. Thus when Pound says that “all this is folly to the world,” he can be referring to this process of poetic transformation and to poetry in general. Poetry may be folly to the world, but it is the highest goal for the young Pound.Writing in the emulative mode, Pound sets himself apart from his predecessors stylistically, but the poem is still dependent on its sources to throw the stylistic changes into relief. Pound shows how he deals with the Daphne myth and its implications for poetic creation in relation to Ovid and Petrarch. It cannot be said that the poem replaces (or occludes) the originals, as with a translation, nor can it be said to revive the original text as Petrarch revives Ovid (indeed, Pound is to some extent trying to lay them to rest, or at least stand victorious over their corpses). Nor can it be said to work on its own without reference to a tradition of retelling the Daphne myth. The poem is at best a training ground for later poems, or a cl