By imitation Aristotle means just what the word means most simply and usually, but also and more largely the following of the ways of human nature, the representation or the suggestion of men’s characters, emotions, and actions.[14] At its lowest, imitation is mimicry; at its highest, creation. The latter is often implied in the Greek word _poetic_.[15] Poetic is one of the fine arts. By whatever means, in whatever forms, it is a direct showing of life, as distinct from any account of life through experiment or reasoning. The artist enhances our impressions of life by the suggestions of music or of story, the representations of dance or of drama. All these ways are called by Aristotle imitation because they follow the movements of human life. It is noteworthy that he presents imitation primarily as a constructive or progressive principle. The more obvious imitation achieved by a single phrase, a single melody, or a single dance-movement is reserved for later discussion of detail.[16] The poet is a maker, as indeed he was called by our Elizabethans as well as by the Greeks, in the sense that he is creative. Poet, poetry, poetic, all are used by Aristotle with this broad implication of creative composition,[17] of “imitating men in action.” Secondly, Aristotle specifies as kinds of the poetic art tragedy and comedy, which belong together as drama, and on the other hand epic, mime, dialogue, which also belong together, but have no common name. We lack, he says, a generic name for those forms of poetic art which, however various, are alike in having for their sole means of imitation words. The generic name that Aristotle desired to cover all prose and all metrical compositions in which the imitation is through words alone is still to seek. Yet that the genus is distinct through many varieties of form is even clearer to-day than in his time. The imitation of dancing and of all forms of drama is through representation; the imitation of music without words is through suggestion. Now so is the imitation of words without music. True, the words in the latter case carry something besides imitation; they convey ideas; but in so far as they achieve imitation, they do so by suggestion, and it is this suggestive imitation that makes them poetic. What is needed, then, is a term to cover all composition in words that proceeds by suggestion. Perhaps the nearest term in modern English is _narrative_. Using narrative widely enough to include, as in common modern use it often does include, dialogue and description, we have the term that Aristotle desired. _Story_ would serve if it were not often used of the plot of a play or of an account in a newspaper. _Narrative_ usually connotes a distinct method. A distinguishing generic term is more important to-day than in the time of Aristotle. Modern authors have developed narrative in directions little explored by the ancients. We have thus a variety of narrative forms which was quite unknown to Aristotle.