.

CIC. There are then many species of poets and crowns?

TANS. Not only as many as there are Muses, but a great many more; for
although genius is to be met with, yet certain modes and species of
human ingenuity cannot be thus classified.

CIC. There are certain schoolmen who barely allow Homer to be a poet,
and set down Virgil, Ovid, Martial, Hesiod, Lucretius, and many others
as versifiers, judging them by the rules of poetry of Aristotle.

TANS. Know for certain, my brother, that such as these are beasts. They
do not consider that those rules serve principally as a frame for the
Homeric poetry, and for other similar to it, and they set up one as a
great poet, high as Homer, and disallow those of other vein, and art,
and enthusiasm, who in their various kinds are equal, similar, or
greater.

CIC. So that Homer was not a poet who depended upon rules, but was the
cause of the rules which serve for those who are more apt at imitation
than invention, and they have been used by him who, being no poet, yet
knew how to take the rules of Homeric poetry into service, so as to
become, not a poet or a Homer, but one who apes the Muse of others?

TANS. Thou dost well conclude that poetry is not born in rules, or only
slightly and accidentally so; the rules are derived from the poetry, and
there are as many kinds and sorts of true rules as there are kinds and
sorts of true poets.

CIC. How then are the true poets to be known?

TANS. By the singing of their verses; in that singing they give delight,
or they edify, or they edify and delight together.

CIC. To whom then are the rules of Aristotle useful?

TANS. To him who, unlike Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, and others, could not
sing without the rules of Aristotle, and who, having no Muse of his own,
would coquette with that of Homer.

CIC. Then they are wrong, those stupid pedants of our days, who exclude
from the number of poets those who do not use words and metaphors
conformable to, or whose principles are not in union with, those of
Homer and Virgil; or because they do not observe the custom of
invocation, or because they weave one history or tale with another, or
because they finish the song with an epilogue on what has been said and
a prelude on what is to be said, and many other kinds of criticism and
censure, from whence it seems they would imply that they themselves, if
the fancy took them, could be the true poets; and yet in fact they are
no other than worms, that