8


The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having
one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man,
some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner
there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one
action. One sees, therefore, the mistake of all the poets who have
written a _Heracleid_, a _Theseid_, or similar poems; they suppose
that, because Heracles was one man, the story also of Heracles must be
one story. Homer, however, evidently understood this point quite well,
whether by art or instinct, just in the same way as he excels the rest
i.e.ery other respect. In writing an _Odyssey_, he did not make the
poem cover all that ever befell his hero--it befell him, for instance,
to get wounded on Parnassus and also to feign madness at the time of
the call to arms, but the two incidents had no probable or necessary
connexion with one another--instead of doing that, he took an action
with a Unity of the kind we are describing as the subject of the
_Odyssey_, as also of the _Iliad_. The truth is that, just as in the
other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in
poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one
action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely
connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will
disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible
difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.