 1. I intend to discuss the essence of poetry, its various forms, and the power and function of each form. I will examine how the plot should be created for the poem to be good and beautiful, the nature and number of the parts of a poem, and whatever else is appropriate to this inquiry. I will begin in a natural way by examining first principles. Epic, tragic, comic, and dithoramic poetry are generally forms of imitation, as is most music for the flute and the harp, but they differ from each other in three ways, either in their separate medium, or in their means, or in the object of presentation. While some artists portray many different things by means of color and shape, and others use sound based on art or practice, poets generally create through rhythm, language, and melody by using them either separately or combined. Flute playing and harp playing only use melody and rhythm. This is also true of similar arts, such as playing the panpipes. Dancers use only rhythm without melody, because they are able to present character, emotion, and action by means of rhythmic movement. Another kind of art employs only language, either in bear prose or in verse. If it is composed in verse, the meter may be single or a combination. This art does not have a name, because no common term has yet been applied to the mimes of Sofran and Xenarchus, the Socratic dialogues, or to those who present their art in trimetric, elegiac, or any similar meter. Nevertheless, people are in the habit of calling them poets simply for their use of verse, rather than for what they create. They add the word poet to the name of the meter that is used, calling some of them elegiac poets and others epic poets. Even when people publish a medical essay or a work of physics in verse, they are commonly called poets. However, Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except that they both use meter, so it would be correct to call Homer a poet and Empedocles a physicist, rather than a poet. By the same token, we would call someone a poet who succeeds in creating a work even if all kinds of verse forms are mixed, as Caramon did in his poem Centaur, a composition that includes many forms. This is how the distinctions can be made clear. Some kinds of art utilize all the means I've mentioned—rhythm, melody, and meter—in dithoramic and gnomic poetry as well as in comedy and tragedy. They differ in that dithoramic and gnomic poetry maintain their means from beginning to end, whereas in tragedy and comedy they alternate. These are the differences in the various arts by which creation is achieved. Poets present human actions. Those actions are either good or bad, because characters are generally one or the other. People differ in character because of goodness or badness. Therefore, poets portray their characters either as better than we are, worse than we are, or the same as we are. Painters have the same purpose. Polygnotus portrays people as better than we are, Pauson as worse than we are, and Dionysius portrays them the same as we are. It is now clear that all of the arts I have mentioned manifest these distinctions, and that they will differ from each other by portraying objects in one of the three ways mentioned. These differences can also occur in dancing, flute playing, and harp playing, as well as in pro—Sample complete. Ready to continue?