ur own species--I mean belong in the full sense of the term
and that the action in which it is sought to interest us be a moral
action; that is, an action comprehended in the field of free-will. It is
necessary, in the second place, that suffering, its sources, its degrees,
should be completely communicated by a series of events chained together.
It is necessary, in the third place, that the object of the passion be
rendered present to our senses, not in a mediate way and by description,
but immediately and in action. In tragedy art unites all these
conditions and satisfies them.

According to these principles tragedy might be defined as the poetic
imitation of a coherent series of particular events (forming a complete
action): an imitation which shows us man in a state of suffering, and
which has for its end to excite our pity.

I say first that it is the imitation of an action; and this idea of
imitation already distinguishes tragedy from the other kinds of poetry,
which only narrate or describe. In tragedy particular events are
presented to our imagination or to our senses at the very time of their
accomplishment; they are present, we see them immediately, without the
intervention of a third person. The epos, the romance, simple narrative,
even in their form, withdraw action to a distance, causing the narrator
to come between the acting person and the reader. Now what is distant
and past always weakens, as we know, the impressions and the sympathetic
affection; what is present makes them stronger. All narrative forms make
of the present something past; all dramatic form makes of the past a
present.

Secondly, I say that tragedy is the imitation of a succession of events,
of an action. Tragedy has not only to represent by imitation the
feelings and the affections of tragic persons, but also the events that
have produced these feelings, and the occasion on which these affections
are manifested. This distinguishes it from lyric poetry, and from its
different forms, which no doubt offer, like tragedy, the poetic imitation
of certain states of the mind, but not the poetic imitation of certain
actions. An elegy, a song, an ode, can place before our eyes, by
imitation, the moral state in which the poet actually is--whether he
speaks in his own name, or in that of an ideal person--a state determined
by particular circumstances; and up to this point these lyric forms seem
certainly to be incorporated in the idea of tragedy;