the curious thing here, for me, is again RS Crane's insight : that Aristotle's notion of such "self-standing" aesthetic form is not really text-based, but follows from an idea of the "poem" as an amalgam - a whole (which is not the same as its text) made out of time, action, suspense, character, spectacle, music, diction - all combined.

I'm reading Ford et al. to explore how other genres & modes of poetry relate to, stem from, this same action-performance nexus.