And to define the
matter roughly, we may say that the proper magnitude is comprised
within such limits, that the sequence of events, according to the
law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from bad
fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad.
POETICS|8
VIII
Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the
unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one
man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are
many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.
Hence the error, as it appears, of all poets who have composed a
Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind. They imagine that as
Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity.
But Homer, as in all else he is of surpassing merit, here too- whether
from art or natural genius- seems to have happily discerned the truth.
In composing the Odyssey he did not include all the adventures of
Odysseus- such as his wound on Parnassus, or his feigned madness at
the mustering of the host- incidents between which there was no
necessary or probable connection: but he made the Odyssey, and
likewise the Iliad, to center round an action that in our sense of the
word is one. As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the
imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being
an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole,
the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of
them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and
disturbed.
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