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”.