This is a book about ancient philosophical poetics. It is not concerned with ancient literary theory, criticism or scholarship in general. Those are interesting topics with important implications for our understanding of ancient poetry. Here, however, our concern is with ancient attempts to answer specifically philosophical questions about poetry.

Specifically philosophical questions? That is not a well-defined or stable class. But I take it to include, for example, such questions as these. What is poetry? How is it related to, and differentiated from, other human practices and products? Why is poetry? What motivates its production and consumption? If it is a universal human behaviour, common to cultures all over the world, how is it rooted in human nature? What does poetry contribute to human life? What is the point of it? In what ways may it be of value? Are we doing it properly? Eating is a natural human behaviour, but people are prone to eat things that are bad for them. Is the consumption of junk poetry harmful? How could we tell if our taste for poetry is leading us astray? If poetry is potentially dangerous, should society protect us by regulating its production or dissemination? Should there be laws to promote its true purpose? If we live in a society without such laws, how can we organise our own lives to ensure that we, and those for whose well-being we care, have a healthy diet, whether of food, or of poetry? These questions take us far beyond technical aspects of poetics, and beyond aesthetics narrowly defined. There are broader issues in, most obviously, ethics and politics, but also in psychology and anthropology. These in turn lead us on to theology; to questions about the fundamental structures of reality, the sources of knowledge, and the grounds of value; and also, of course, to differing conceptions of philosophy itself.