Other poets appear themselves upon the scene throughout, and imitate but little and rarely.

The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects- things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be.

TS Eliot had already expressed a similar idea in 1920, when he claimed that "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different".

Subsequently, many other Persian poets imitated him and wrote their own versions of the romance.

According to Dr. Rudolf Gelpke: Many later poets have imitated Nizami's work, even if they could not equal and certainly not surpass it; Persians, Turks, Indians, to name only the most important ones.

Faced with drawings like these, we remember what T. S. Eliot once said - that whereas the bad poet imitates, the good poet steals.

He thus wrote his speeches as "models" for his students to imitate in the same way that poets might imitate Homer or Hesiod, seeking to inspire in them a desire to attain fame through civic leadership.

Without Plath's skill, younger poets imitate her pouncing violence at their peril.

The quotation is slightly ironic, in a sense, because it is itself a paraphrase from T.S. Eliot, who wrote, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

Or, as T. S. Eliot more bluntly put it in his essay on the Jacobean dramatist Philip Massinger: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."