It is important that the modern reader bear these facts in mind; for in the nineteenth century text-books of rhetoric came to include description of a kind little considered by classical rhetoricians, and narrative of an aim and scope which they excluded. Thus the modern treatise on rhetoric deals not only with what the Greeks would recognize as rhetoric, but also with what they would classify as poetic. Furthermore, narrative and dramatic technic, which the classical critics considered the most important elements in poetic, are now no longer called poetic. What the ancients discussed in treatises on poetic, is now discussed in treatises on the technique of the short-story, the technique of the drama, the technique of the novel, on the one hand, and in treatises on versification, prosody, and lyric poetry on the other. As these modern developments were unheard of during the periods under consideration in this study, and as the renaissance used the words rhetoric and poetic much more in their classical senses than we do today, it must be understood that throughout this study rhetoric will be used as meaning classical rhetoric, and poetic as meaning classical poetic.
Many modern critics have found the classical distinction between rhetoric and poetic very suggestive. In classical times imaginative and creative literature was almost universally composed in meter, with the result that the metrical form was usually thought to be distinctive of poetry. The fact that in modern times drama as well as epic and romantic fiction is usually composed in prose has made some critics dissatisfied with what to them seems to be an unsatisfactory criterion. On the one hand Wackernagel, who believes that the function of poetry is to convey ideas in concrete and sensuous images and the function of prose to inform the intellect, asserts that prose drama and didactic poetry are inartistic.[[5]] He thus advocates that present practise be abandoned in favor of the custom of the Greeks. On the other hand Newman, while granting that a metrical garb has in all languages been appropriated to poetry, still urges that the essence of poetry is fiction.[[6]] Likewise under the influence of Aristotle, Croce differentiates between the kinds of literature not because one is written in prose and the other in verse, but because one is the expression of what he calls intuitive knowledge obtained through the imagination, and the other of conceptual knowledge obtained through the intellect.[[7]] Similar to the distinction expressed by Croce in the words imaginative and intellectual, is that expressed by Eastman in the words poetical and practical.[[8]] And according to Renard, Balzac distinguishes two classes of writers: the writers of ideas and the writers of images.[[9]]
In view of these modern efforts to make a more scientific differentiation between kinds of literature than is possible on the basis of the traditional distinction between prose and poetry, the present historical study of the distinction made by Aristotle and other Greek writers between rhetoric and poetic may be suggestive.
Chapter II
Classical Poetic
1. Aristotle
A survey of what Aristotle includes in his Poetics, what he excludes, and what he ignores, will be a helpful initial step in an investigation of what he meant by poetic. Five kinds of poetry are mentioned by name in the Poetics: epic, dramatic, dithyrambic, nomic, and satiric; and lyric is included by implication as a form of epic, where the poet narrates in his own person.[[10]]
The choruses, also, are lyric. Otherwise Aristotle does not discuss lyric poetry. Of the other five kinds, nomic, dithyrambic, and satiric poetry are mentioned only as illustrative of something Aristotle wishes to say about epic or drama. Aristotle's Poetics discusses only epic and, especially, drama. Thus of the twenty-six books into which the Poetics is conventionally divided, five are devoted to the general theory of poetry, three to diction, two to epic, and sixteen to drama. Although Aristotle includes dithyrambic, nomic, satiric, and lyric poetry in his discussion, he practically ignores them.
On the other hand he specifically excludes from poetry such scientific works as those of Empedocles and historical writings as those of Herodotus.[[11]] The rhetorical element in the speeches of the characters of drama or epic, Aristotle calls Thought (διάνια). Although Aristotle includes Thought as an element in drama, he does not discuss it in the Poetics, but refers his reader to the Rhetoric. Metrics, which occupies so large a place in modern treatises on the theory of poetry, Aristotle likewise mentions several times, but does not discuss. A metrical structure he accepts as the usual practice in poetical composition, but he rejects verse as the distinguishing mark of poetic. Thus he refuses to classify as poetry the scientific writings which Empedocles had composed in meter as well as the histories of Herodotus, even if he had written them in verse. On the other hand, the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus, although composed in prose, he considers within the scope of poetic.[[12]]
If to Aristotle, then, verse is not the characteristic quality of poetic, the next step in an investigation must be to discover the criterion by which he classifies some literature as poetry and other as not poetry. The characteristic quality, according to Aristotle, which is possessed by the Socratic dialogs, by the Homeric epics, and by the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and which classifies them together as poetic, is not verse but mimesis, imitation.[[13]] Exactly what Aristotle meant by imitation has furnished subsequent critics with an excuse for writing many volumes. The usual meaning of the word to the Greek, as to the modern, seems to be little more than an aping or mimicking. Aristotle himself uses imitate in this sense when he speaks of the delight children take in imitation.[[14]] But in establishing imitation as the criterion of poetic, Aristotle seems to have injected something of a private, or at least a special scientific meaning into the word. As the characteristic quality of poetic, imitation to Aristotle evidently did not mean a literal copy. Plato had attacked poetry as unreal, a thrice-removed imitation of the only true reality. To defend poetic against the strictures of his master Aristotle reads more into the word than that.
In discovering what Aristotle had in mind when he speaks of imitation, the student must read from one treatise to another, for few writers of any period are so addicted to the habit of cross-reference. In the Psychology Aristotle states that all stimuli received by the senses at the moment of perception are impressed upon the mind as in wax. The images held by the image-forming faculty are thus the after effect of sensation. These images remain and may be recalled by the image-forming faculty. From this store-house of images, or after effects of sensation, the reasoning faculty derives the materials for thought as well as those for artistic expression.[[15]] Imagination evidently has much to do with Aristotle's conception of the nature of poetic. Imitation, then, to him, meant a conscious selection and plastic mastery of the sense impressions stored as images by the image-forming faculty of the author, whose writings are addressed to the imagination of the reader or auditor. Furthermore, Butcher's interpretation of "imitation of nature" seems both sound and suggestive. According to him the imitation of nature is the imitation of nature's ways. In this sense the act of the poet may well be called creation.