 Imitation is a formal concept in Book 3. This is to say 1) that one can distinguish poetic mimêsis from poetic narration by looking for a formal element in the poetry; and 2) that mimêsis may make poetry more deleterious than it would otherwise be, but does not work these bad effects by itself, only when the characters represented are bad to begin with. The definition of imitation in Book 3 entails no general ideas of similarity or likeness. Mimêsis functions as a technical term with a narrowly literary meaning, no more inherently philosophical than is the distinction one would draw in English today between direct and indirect discourse.