Don’t break that fiddle: Eclectic Imitators
Tobias Gregory, 19 November 2020
Writers imitate their precursors, consciously or not. Nobody starts from scratch. Even the Homeric poems had traditions behind them. To write is to enter a conversation, to make your own reading into a usable past, to choose the literary company you seek to join, or to beat. A writer, Saul Bellow said, is a reader moved to emulation. The question is not whether to imitate, but what to...