effort, Mazzoni wrote the more extensive and more sophisticated On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante. In this work, before directly addressing Dante’s work, Mazzoni develops his theory of poetics, in which, drawing heavily from Plato and Aristotle, he discusses mimesis, the role of poetry, and the definition of poetry versus poetics (see Theory section, below). Though no complete English translation of Mazzoni’s text exists, excerpts from the Introduction and Summary have appeared in some anthologies, as well as in a partial translation by Robert L. Montgomery. Theory One of Mazzoni’s more interesting contributions to criticism is his discussion of mimesis in poetry. Mazzoni departs from his predecessors in that he conceives poetic imitation as not the recreation of an actual object, but of the recreation of an ideal. This idea, which has been compared to Baudrillard’s simulacrum, Mazzoni calls the "idol" – a concept constructed by human artifice to which poetic imitations are compared in order to determine their believability. Mazzoni discusses believability or credibility, rather than truth – he defines poetry as a sophistic activity, the purpose of which is not to recreate truth, but rather to mimic that which will have the proper effect on the audience. As Mazzoni says, "if it should happen that two things should appear before the poet, one of them false but credible and the other true but incredible or at least not very credible, then the poet must leave the true and follow the credible." Mazzoni resurrects the ancient tradition of linking poetry to rhetoric, which also has the credible, rather than the true, as its object. He also gives great importance to poetry's effect on the audience as a determinant of quality – though he admits that much of the exercise of poetry involves attempting faithful imitation (albeit of human constructs or "categories", not ones that are necessarily "true"), success in poetry is ultimately determined by persuasion, not truth and objectivity. For him, successful poetry is something that occurs in and of the audience, not outside and independent of it. For Mazzoni, even "poetry" is a meaningless category – it is our classifications that constitute criticism, not our ability to form a relationship with some reified thing called "The Poem". Like Plato, Mazzoni was very concerned with determining the purpose of poetry (Weinberg, 324). For him, its purpose is to "move the reader to pleasure and delight in the