[57] The paragraph is adapted from the author’s _College Composition_, page 248. [58] πολιτεία. [59] μίμησις. [60] _Laws_ 817 b; quoted by Bywater on Aristotle’s _Poetic_, 1450 a. CHAPTER VII POETIC IN ANCIENT DRAMA AND NARRATIVE The classical practise of poetic in the two modes distinguished by Aristotle, dramatic and narrative, has a twofold significance. It has the claim of all great art for its own beauty; and it reveals certain fundamentals of literary form and literary influence. Classical influences on later art have been defined sometimes vaguely, sometimes amiss, for lack of clear grasp of classical practise. Yet the vitality of classical poetic art is hardly more proverbial than its definiteness. Without circumscribing in formulas its creative variety, we can discern quite clearly its artistic habits in these two enduring modes. Into such a survey recent questions as to literary forms need not enter. How far a literary form may be modified or extended without losing its character, how suggestive a recognized form is to the composing imagination, are questions important rather for those modern times in which the artist is much concerned with individual self-expression than for the centuries in which he was more the spokesman of a community. Even if Brunetière’s transference of the word _genre_ from biology to literature be only analogy, even if Croce’s denial that a literary form is directive of the artist be justified, we must still use the terms drama and epic. From Aristotle down, criticism has used them not only for convenience, but because in fact there were two typical ways of extensive imaginative composition in words, varying in detail but constant essentially, and always sharply distinct. Whether these should rather be called types or modes than forms is a question for later consideration. For the purposes of the present review the terms drama and epic connote only habits of composition universally recognized.