The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

120 Imitation
Imitation The first recorded use of
‘imitation’ (mimesis) as an aesthetic term
is Plato’s: in the Republic it is a derogatory
way of describing the poet’s counterfeit
‘creations’, which reflect and mimic the
transient appearances of this world (see
PLATONISM). Aristotle in his Poetics
stretches the term to give it a radically different
and more complex application: the
poet ‘imitates’ not the accidental features
of character in action, but the universal
type, ‘clothed with generic attributes’
(Coleridge). Aristotle is not arguing for a
symbolic or emblematic function for literature
(only that would have satisfied
Plato) but for a concrete manifestation of
the ‘natural’ order he asserted was present
(though obscured) in ordinary experience.
Aristotle’s ‘imitation’ combines a sense
of the literary work as the representation of
some pre-existent reality, with a sense of
the work itself as an object, not merely a
reflecting surface. The poet is not subservient
to the irrationality of the actual:
the play or poem has its own natural form
and objective status. In the Poetics tragedy
is like an organism – it grows, achieves its
prime (with Sophocles) and decays. The
form has an imperative logic whereby
(e.g.) the poet chooses a ‘probable impossibility’
rather than an event which though
possible (even historical) does not follow
‘naturally’ in context. The poet ‘imitates’
best by allowing the work to achieve its
own fitting formal excellence.
This stress on the imitative function of
formal harmony (Aristotle says music is
the most ‘mimetic’ art) connects with the
second major use of the term in classical
and neo-classical criticism – the ‘imitation’
of one writer by another (Homer by
Virgil, both by Milton, all three by Pope).
If Homer’s epics are the fullest realization
of the laws of epic (and involve therefore
the fullest correspondence with the laws
of reason and nature) then to imitate
heroic action and to imitate the form and
style of the Iliad is one complex process
of mimesis. Hence Pope’s snappy line on
Virgil:
Nature and Homer were, he found, the
same.
Theoretically there is no conflict between
formal imitation and representation, but
neither ‘nature’ nor language stay ‘the
same’, and in practice there is tension,
issuing in the characteristic neo-classical
forms of MOCK-EPIC and PARODY.
For the concept of imitation to retain
its precision and range, social, moral and
psychological values must seem selfevident:
there has to be consensus about
what is ‘natural’ and ‘probable’, or at least
agreement about the value of such generalizations.
In the eighteenth century an
anti-theoretical realism, reflecting a more
fluid, fragmentary and individual reality
(see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1957;
and REALISM) began to erode the assumptions
behind imitation. The term lost its
great virtue of referring to both form and
content and was used almost synonymously
with ‘representation’. Deliberate
efforts to resurrect Aristotelian usage (see
CHICAGO CRITICS) foundered in stilted and
questionable generalization, while more
fluent use of the term (e.g. Auerbach’s
Mimesis) had to accommodate shifting
definitions of reality.
See Erich Auerbach, trans. W. Trask,
Mimesis (1953); S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s
Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (1907) with
an introduction by John Gassner (1951);
R. S. Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism
(1957); G. F. Else, Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’:
The Argument (1957); Raymond Williams,
The Long Revolution (1961).
Implied author See AUTHOR, PERSONA.
Intention In their influential essay
‘The intentional fallacy’ (in The Verbal
Icon, 1954) W. K. Wimsatt, Jr and
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