"How is Aristotle's suggestion in the Poetics that human beings are distinguished by their imitative faculties rleated to his better known definition of 'man' as a rational or political animal? In the course of a careful commentary on the Greek text, Michael Davis provides a highly origainal, thought-provoking answer." - Catherine Zuckert, University of Notre Dame "Michael Davis's study of Aritotle's Poetics moves with great wit and subtlety from the stand-up comic to Oedipus, from politics to metaphor, from the commonplace to the profound. Revealing what is wonderful and strange in familiar notions of peotry and tragedy, and explaining what is baffling in Aristotle's text, Davis provides an interpretation worth of the Philosopher himself." - Mary P. Nichols, Fordham University