ABSTRACT
It is time for a fuller appreciation of the crucial role played in Jonson’s aesthetic, particularly in the poems of praise, by the dynamic and fruitful process of imitation as the ancients knew it.1 Both as metaphor and practice, imitation stands at the center of Jonson’s choice of content, his method of treating his materials, and his very view of life. No English poet of his time, as has often been noted in passing, shows such a coherent and wholehearted devotion to the principle that intimate acquaintance with the writers of classical tradition provides the basis for great and original art. Others might on occasion translate, quote, or adapt; but it is Jonson’s achievement to have made the much-buffeted idea of imitatio into a personal doctrine of great force. This is hardly surprising, given the highly developed historical sense nurtured in him by his master William Camden and the fact that imitation was the perfect vehicle for one of the conceptions that Jonson most wanted to express in his didactic and hortatory vein: the close identity between the way a good writer works and the way a good man thinks and acts.
