ABSTRACT
Why do human beings make poetry? is a question that Aristotle entertains in his Poetics and to which he gives essentially the same answer as Ray Charles. "Just for the thrill," says Ray Charles in a somewhat different context, You turned my night into day. You made my heart stand still. Just for the thrill. Just for the thrill. (Ray Charles, "Just for the Thrill"), while Aristotle tells us it is an instinct of our human nature to find pleasure in mimesis (1448b). Aristotle's subsequent account of the media, manner, and valuation of mimesis places a notable emphasis on its character as action or praxis. I do not find transparently clear what Aristotle says about praxis in its application to the dramatic arts, which are his main subject in Poetics, but I am provoked by the possibility of understanding mimetic praxis within the context of a genre that has not been obscured for us by Aristotle's particular mode of clarification, namely, lyric poetry. And although the third book of Poetics, concerned with lyric imitation, is not extant, Aristotle himself might endorse an attempt to assess the dynamis of lyric praxis by studying its energeia. That the corpus of ancient lyric verse represents an open force field of mimetic energies becomcs immediately clear to anyone who scrutinizes examples of its texts with appropriate care. Few readers do so; as Aristotle complains, "people nowadays sycophantize poetry" (καὶ ώς νῦν συκοφαντοῦσιν τοὺς ποιητάς 1456a), using a verb, syko-phantousin, whose origin is debated but which appears to be formed from the noun sykon meaning "fig" and the verb phainein meaning "to reveal" (c. LSJ). Fig-revealers were people who denounced anyone caught stealing, hoarding, or seeking to illicitly export figs. Fig-revealers were hasty, tendentious, negative people resembling literary critics in their inclination to, as the Chinese proverb puts it, "sell the dog's body to feed its mouth."
