Many modern critics have found the classical distinction between rhetoric
and poetic very suggestive. In classical times imaginative and creative
literature was almost universally composed in meter, with the result that
the metrical form was usually thought to be distinctive of poetry. The
fact that in modern times drama as well as epic and romantic fiction is
usually composed in prose has made some critics dissatisfied with what to
them seems to be an unsatisfactory criterion. On the one hand Wackernagel,
who believes that the function of poetry is to convey ideas in concrete
and sensuous images and the function of prose to inform the intellect,
asserts that prose drama and didactic poetry are inartistic.[5] He thus
advocates that present practise be abandoned in favor of the custom of the
Greeks. On the other hand Newman, while granting that a metrical garb has
in all languages been appropriated to poetry, still urges that the essence
of poetry is fiction.[6] Likewise under the influence of Aristotle, Croce
differentiates between the kinds of literature not because one is written
in prose and the other in verse, but because one is the expression of what
he calls intuitive knowledge obtained through the imagination, and the
other of conceptual knowledge obtained through the intellect.[7] Similar
to the distinction expressed by Croce in the words imaginative and
intellectual, is that expressed by Eastman in the words poetical and
practical.[8] And according to Renard, Balzac distinguishes two classes of
writers: the writers of ideas and the writers of images.[9]

In view of these modern efforts to make a more scientific differentiation
between kinds of literature than is possible on the basis of the
traditional distinction between prose and poetry, the present historical
study of the distinction made by Aristotle and other Greek writers between
rhetoric and poetic may be suggestive.