Whether it means as in the Ion that gods inspire poetry, or as in Republic 10 that imitative poetry imitates appearance alone, ignorance matters less than the implications drawn from it.
In 1849 a fine Sèvres pink (imitative rose Pompadour and called rose du Barry) attracted many orders; plausible imitations of German Meissen or copies of Sèvres and Chelsea with their marks were numerous.
I realised, I think, even at that early age that opportunities for imitative anarchical expression were going to be severely limited by my misfortune of having been born a particularly weedy girl in early 80s suburbia instead of a sturdy village boy 60 years earlier.
But they are often imitative opportunists: if somebody makes a fortune selling knock-off purses, a dozen others will rush in to do the same thing.
The Oscars, and established, imitative celebrations of the British music and film industries, have been joined by a new throng of prize-givings.
Unfairly so: he was traditional, but not imitative.
You have to learn to give.But will the philanthropy of figures such as Mr Turner, or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett spawn an imitative trend in 2011?
It originated in a Ritterschule, or "knight's school," imitative of the schools for chevaliers in France, and in 1694 the Holy Roman emperor Leopold I granted it a charter.
They are purely imitative and of conventional form and imagery, yet they are attractive because of their smooth diction and melodious movement.
The most-sophisticated argument for musical scansion was given by Northrop Frye in his influential Anatomy of Criticism (1957), which differentiates between verse that shows unmistakable musical quality and verse written according to the imitative doctrines current in the Renaissance and Neoclassic periods.
Although Ming poets wrote both shi and ci and their output was prodigious, poetry on the whole was imitative rather than freshly creative.
