Johnson, Samuel. The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Papers from the Rambler (1750). Introduction by Bertrand H. Bronson. UCLA, 1950. Project Gutenberg, 2004. Ebook No. 13350.
In England, from the middle ages through the nineteenth century, one of the basic ways to teach composition was through imitation. Given a Latin poem or a piece of prose, a student would be asked to write another poem or piece of prose, either in English or Latin, on the same subject in a similar manner. Samuel Johnson, whose poverty forced him to leave Oxford in his second year, was a master of the art. In “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Johnson takes the tenth satire of Juvenal and updates it in English using his own knowledge of history and drawing his own morals. It was personal to him. As he approached his fortieth year, none of his dreams of literary fame had come true, though he knew he was more talented than most of his competition. In fact, this poem is one of the first pieces he published in his own name, despite having done a ton of Grub Street hack work. Imitation of this sort is now an unappreciated skill and an underrated teaching tool. It depends, though, on having an audience that does not always demand novelty and has a common body of cultural experience on which to draw. Such an audience gets harder to find every day. ( )