not a sandheap

S.H. Butcher, best known for his translations and commentary of Aristotle’s Poetics (New York, 1907)…wrote previously a survey entitled “Greek Literary Criticism” where he presented fully and clearly the significance of Phaedrus 264C*. After quoting the whole passage, Butcher says: “Here, observe, and for the first time, the law of internal unity is enunciated, as a primary condition of literary art—now commonplace, then a discovery...Organic as distinct from mechanical unity; not the homogeneous sameness of a sandheap, but a unity combined with variety, a unity vital and structural, implying mutual dependence of all the parts, such that if a part is displaced or removed, the whole is dislocated...From this point of view the unity and artistic beauty of a literary composition are found to reside in a pervasive harmony, a single animating and controlling principle.” (pp. 192-193)

[quoted from a delightful treatise on the subject of: Organic Unity In Ancient & Later Poetics (Southern Illinois U. Press, 1975) by G. N. Giordano Orsini]

*”Every discourse must be composed like, or in the likeness of, a living being, with a body of its own as it were, so as not to be headless or feetless, but to have a middle and members arranged in fitting relation to each other and to the whole.”