ABSTRACT
The Aristotelian distinction of poetic from rhetoric has been sometimes blurred, sometimes ignored, by criticism. The poetic that shall win a crowd on the spot is more likely than the poetic that shall be savored by individual readers to be sensational. Sensational in fact it was commonly, to judge by examples ranging all the way from Seneca'sControversiae well into the Christian centuries. For consistent development of poetic as a technic distinct from rhetoric is beyond the occasion of most criticism, whether ancient or modern. Literary criticism has often taken direction from philosophy. The general tendency of ancient criticism is to give poetic a moral color. The theory of rhetoric as the energizing of knowledge and the humanizing of truth is explicitly the philosophy of Aristotle and implicitly that of Cicero, Tacitus, Quintilian. Aristotle is almost alone in proposing for poetic principles frankly aesthetic.
