To reinterpret the _Poetic_ in 1924, therefore, should be not merely to reconsider the drama and the epic of Aristotle’s time, valuable as this is historically, but according to Aristotle’s intention to consider what makes drama, our own as well as his, and what vitally moves it to possess an audience. Each interpretation of so fundamental a work must have its own preoccupations. The French interpretations of the seventeenth century had an emphasis different from that of the Italian of the sixteenth; and we in turn must see with our own eyes. But the correction that therefore becomes necessary, lest we make Aristotle say what we wish, lies in the text itself. Fortunately the _Poetic_ is short enough to be read attentively in two hours; and its terms, though translated somewhat variously, sometimes imperfectly, now and then perversely, really demand not so much erudition as patience, attention to the context, and some acquaintance with the processes of art. The _Poetic_ should be read consecutively as a whole and then scrutinized in its parts. Interrupted though it is here and there, in some few places even fragmentary, it nevertheless progresses as a whole.[4] As to its terms, the best precaution is to remember that they mean to express the processes of actual composition and the results of the actual representation of drama or of the actual recitation of epic. In this sense the book is practical. It is not, as Bywater implies,[5] the less theoretical; but it deals with the composing as well as with the thing composed.