An animal a thousand miles long...

Just one of my favorite passages from the Poetics, which I'm rereading. Aristotle is talking about plot. I've mixed together two translations, alternating between that of Hubbard and that of Butcher as their formulations become more or less useful:

It is not enough for beauty that a thing, whether an animal or anything else composed of parts, should have those parts well-ordered; since beauty consists in amplitude as well as in order, the thing must also have amplitude--and not just any amplitude. Though a very small creature could not be beautiful, since our view loses all distinctness when it comes near to taking no perceptible time, an enormously ample one could not be beautiful either, since the eye cannot take it in all at once, so that we lose the sense of its unity and wholeness as we look it over; imagine, for instance, an animal a thousand miles long. As, therefore, in the case of animate bodies and organisms a certain magnitude is necessary, and a magnitude which may be easily embraced in one view; so in the plot, a certain length is necessary, and a length which can be easily embraced by the memory. What is, for the poetic art, the limit of this length? Certainly not that imposed by the [dramatic] contests and by perception--if a hundred plays had to be performed during the festival, they would time the performance by the hour glass, as they say once on another occasion... As the limit imposed by the actual nature of the thing, one may suggest that the ampler the better, provided it remains clear as a whole. Or, to define the matter roughly, sufficient amplitude to allow a probable or necessary succession of particular actuions to produce a change from bad to good or from good to bad fortune.
-Aristotle, Poetics 1450b

The history of this view is fascinating, from it's disappearance in Sidney, who favors other parts of the short piece in his unbelievable Platonic-Aristotelian mashup (that is, the Defense of Poesy), to the classic debates in French and English dramatic criticism about the unities, to what I'd argue is its full restoration after Dryden, in what I'd say is, next to the revived ballad, the most important poetic innovation of the whole 18th Century, the descriptive poem--except now inverted, on its head, no longer dealt with in terms of plot but in terms of the perception itself that Aristotle here dismisses.