them all. “The capacity to produce an imitation is the essential characteristic of the poet.”22 The mimetic perspective concentrates on the universe, a comprehensive term that refers to existing things: people, ideas, images, materials, or actions. It evaluates literature by how well it imitates, represents, or copies the external world. Various formulations of the concept dominate literary theory from the fourth century B.C.E. through the eighteenth century C.E.23 The orientation persists to this