Life & Wisdom Quote by James Fenton

Imitation gets a bad rap because we like our art narratives the way we like our origin myths: clean, solitary, and unprecedented. Fenton punctures that romance with a poet's pragmatism. The opening hinge, "if it is not forgery", admits the obvious moral tripwire, then immediately refuses to let that tripwire define the whole terrain. He's defending imitation not as laziness, but as a disciplined, almost ethical practice: learning how a thing is made by trying to make it again.

The slyness is in how he recasts copying as "generous". That word turns the usual suspicion on its head. Instead of theft, imitation becomes tribute, conversation, apprenticeship - an act that assumes another artist is worth spending your time inside. It's also generous to the imitator: permission to be unfinished, to borrow a scaffolding while you build your own architecture.

Then comes the corrective to modern self-mythologizing: "a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done". For a poet, that's craft talk disguised as a moral claim. Constraints aren't the enemy of originality; they're the conditions that produce it. Fenton is quietly arguing that taste precedes voice. You imitate what you admire, and in that friction between admiration and inadequacy, your differences reveal themselves.

The context is a literary culture obsessed with authenticity but built on forms, lineages, and echoes. Fenton's point lands as both defense and warning: mimicry is healthy when it's transparent and transformative; it becomes forgery when it tries to pass as uncaused genius. The real target isn't plagiarism. It's the vanity that demands invention without inheritance.