 By contrast, the tragic imitators excel at portraying the psychic conflicts of people who are suffering and who do not even attempt to respond philosophically. Since their audience consists of people whose own selves are in that sort of condition too, imitators and audience are locked into a sort of mutually reinforcing picture of the human condition. Both are captured by that part of themselves given to the non-rational or irrational; both are most interested in the condition of internal conflict. The poet “awakens this part of the soul and nourishes it,” producing a disordered psychic regime or constitution (politeia, 605b7–8; compare this language to that of the passages at the end of book IX of the Republic). The “childish” part of the soul that revels in the poet’s pictures cannot distinguish truth from reality; it uncritically grants the poet’s authority to tell it like it is. Onlookers become emotively involved in the poet’s drama.