The Messiah; As Predicted in the Pentateuch and Psalms - Being a New Translation and Critical Exposition of These Ancient Oracles #246729

However, neither Aristotle, nor any of the ancient rhetoricians have furnished us with a proper definition of poetry for when we consider the phenomena of language, we find that it is but imitation. It is the constant working of the mind to embody thought in articulate sounds.2 All language, therefore, may be characterised as an imitative art, a representation of our conceptions. What we still desiderate, is a definition of poetry, stating not so much its relation to other arts, as drawing a line of demarcation between it and the cognate phenomenon of language, prose composition.