Is plagiarism really such a dirty word? How permissible is it to reshape an existing source? Where does influence end, and infringement begin? These are some of the questions raised by a new anthology, The Mimic Octopus, to be launched next week in London, with a number of leading and up-and-coming poets “translating, versioning, interpreting and imitating” other writers, and sometimes each other within its pages. The co-editors say the anthology aims to recapture a time “when poets were taught to hone their craft by imitation, and there was no shame in following in others' footsteps. As Shakespeare once said, 'The truest poetry is the most feigning' – and he meant it. The art of poetry has always been in a negotiation with the past, with other minds, voices and languages. It's only since the 20th century that the poet has been expected to write in a vacuum, without precedence.”

The poets that co-editors Richard Osmond and Will Harris have gathered together include John Burnside, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, WN Herbert, Helen Mort, and Leonitia Flynn.

Helen Mort’s poem ‘The Deer’ was spectacularly plagiarised by Christian Ward. The scandal, which shocked the poetry world, and led to further discoveries and accusations involving other poets last year, was unearthed after Ward won a prize with his version, which barely departed from Mort’s original. Osmond said: “We had tentatively begun to explore this project several years ago, and actually accepted Helen’s poem for the anthology before the scandal broke.  So on her part it's not a conscious reaction to having been plagiarised.” Mort’s poem is an imitation in the voice of Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky, which she read on Radio 4's Poetry Please last year. Other poets imitated in the anthology include Yeats, Lorca, Valéry and Mallarmé, Cavafy, Hardy, Dickinson, Catullus, Muldoon, Homer, Byron, Wycherley, and Pound.

Osmond added that although plagiarism had informed “a lot of our subsequent work on the anthology …  what we're more interested in are all the arguments we heard in defence of [it] … people saying that the adaptation, reversioning and submerging of other writers' work into one's own is a natural part of the writing process for many poets. Then there were people who were saying it was never acceptable, full stop. Everyone was trying to pinpoint the precise hairline boundary between plagiarism and creative imitation.  Of course, you can never truly find an objective point where the one becomes the other, and what we found ironic is that, until recently, no one would have been expected to. 

“Whether it's a lingering symptom of modernism's fetish of the new, or of capitalist industry's dependence on copyright and patent, poets are now expected to be innovative and iconoclastic, sometimes at the expense of craft.  We thought it would be interesting to create an anthology where this burden of authenticity and originality is momentarily lifted, allowing the reader to enjoy the work for its other qualities.” 

The editors have provided eight "founding tentacles" - aphoristic statements which stand “as an introduction of sorts to the anthology”.  These include: “Even to describe is to counterfeit experience” … “we are all born speechless, and inherit our voices second-hand” … “There is nothing new under the sun”. The last is from Ecclesiastes.  

The anthology will be launched at the Betsey Trotwood pub in Clerkenwell, London, at 7pm on Friday 9 May. More details, including how to buy the anthology, are here