CONCEPT
Classical Imitatio
The pre-Romantic doctrine — codified by Horace and Quintilian, dominant in Western literary theory for two millennia — that treated creative imitation of established models as the discipline of mastery rather than the confession of inadequacy.
Before Young's Conjectures inverted the evaluative framework, the dominant Western understanding of literary production was the classical doctrine of imitatio: creative imitation and improvement of established models. The doctrine did not treat imitation as a failure of originality — originality in the Romantic sense was not yet a literary virtue — but as the discipline of mastery. The good poet was the poet who could take a theme from Virgil, reshape it in the idiom of her own age, and demonstrate command of the tradition by improving upon it. Departure from established models was not genius; it was incompetence, a failure to work within the forms that centuries of practice had refined. Pope's dictum — True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd — captures the classical position with epigrammatic precision.
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Horace's Ars Poetica and Quintilian's rhetorical training supplied the theoretical foundation. The