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The article focuses on the literary writing style of a novelist Laurence Sterne. A true imitator does much more than simply spatchcock other texts into his own, or dutifully give a foreign idea an agreeable turn: other men's thoughts are not a supplement to his own but the very means by which his own thought takes place. At its most utilitarian Sterne's borrowing on his hero's behalf is merely a way of finding convenient sources of recondite information with which to ornament a theme like love, education, or death. These days it is usual to concentrate on his originality, his contempt for rules, his debunking of conventions, his readiness to experiment with the novel-form, in short his modernism. By contrast, those critics who have studied the texts and methods he used to supplement his originality have tended to conclude that he had an old-fashioned taste for literature and wit and that what is odd about him is what is out of date. The imitative component in hobbyhorses is what makes them such apt instruments for character-drawing because it exhibits what the character wishes to present of himself and it also is the means of turning his inside outward.

The article presents abstracts of some papers on poets. One of the paper entitled, "Pope and Plagiarism," by Richard Terry, discusses English poet Alexander Pope's general sensitivity to the ethics of literary borrowing and the numerous accusations of plagiarism that were made against him in his lifetime. It also considers Pope's use of the plagiarism allegation as part of his own satiric practice. Finally, it explore the way that critical writing in the later eighteenth century, especially in the aftermath of Joseph Warton's influential critique, comes to define the nature of Pope's achievement in terms of an inherently plagiaristic aesthetic. Another paper entitled, "T. S. Eliot on the Limits of Criticism: The Anomalous 'Experiment' of 1929," by Ashley Marshall, argues that Eliot's essays represent a major departure from his usual conflicted position in the 1920s and 1930s about the objects of criticism. He seems quickly to have come to regard the essay as a misconceived failure. Emphasis has been laid upon the productivity of that failure in propelling him towards a revised and nuanced understanding of criticism and of his place in tradition.