learned to be of value in persuasive public speech. It taught how to work
up a case by drawing valid inferences from sound evidence, how to organize
this material in the most persuasive order, how to compose in clear and
harmonious sentences. Thus to the Greeks and Romans rhetoric was defined
by its function of discovering means to persuasion and was taught in the
schools as something that every free-born man could and should learn.

In both these respects the ancients felt that poetic, the theory of
poetry, was different from rhetoric. As the critical theorists believed
that the poets were inspired, they endeavored less to teach men to be
poets than to point out the excellences which the poets had attained.
Although these critics generally, with the exceptions of Aristotle and
Eratosthenes, believed the greatest value of poetry to be in the teaching
of morality, no one of them endeavored to define poetry, as they did
rhetoric, by its purpose. To Aristotle, and centuries later to Plutarch,
the distinguishing mark of poetry was imitation. Not until the
renaissance did critics define poetry as an art of imitation endeavoring
to inculcate morality. Consequently in a historical study of rhetoric and
of the theory of poetry separate treatment of their nature and of their
purpose is not only convenient, but historical. The present discussion,
therefore, considers various critics' ideas of the nature of poetry in
Part I, and then separately in Part II their ideas of its purpose. The
object of this division is not to make an abstract distinction between
nature and purpose. Such a distinction cannot, of course, be made. It is
to approach the subject first from one point of view and then from the
other because it was in fact thus approached successively, and because
also the intention of the successive writers can thus be better
understood.

The same essential difference between classical rhetoric and poetic