Organic Unity is the idea that a thing is made up of interdependent parts. For example, a body is made up of its constituent organs, or a society is made up of its constituent social roles.

In literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, Organic unity is a concept founded by the philosopher, Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

. The structure in itself, started to take rudimentary form through certain works by Plato including The Republic, Phaedrus and Gorgias

Gorgias

Gorgias ,Greek sophist, pre-socratic philosopher and rhetorician, was a native of Leontini in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger...

. Organic unity lacked a true definitive role or theme in literary history until the principle was adopted by Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

. Aristotle’s writings all maintained respective, metaphoric reflections of organic unity. In Aristotle’s Poetics

Poetics

Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory...

, organic unity is described by how writing relies internally on narration and drama to remain cohesive to one another, not separate entities. Without balance on both sides, the whole concept suffers. The main theme of organic unity relies on a free spirited style of writing and by following any guidelines or genre-based habits, the true nature of a work becomes stifled and unreliable on an artistic plane.

The concept of organic unity gained popularity through the New Critics

New Criticism

New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

movement. Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks was an influential American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education...

 played an integral role in modernizing the organic unity principle. In a study based around the poem, The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks relayed the importance of a work’s ability to flow and maintain a theme so that the work can only gain momentum, from beginning to end. Organic unity is the common thread keeps a theme from becoming broken and disjointed as a work moves forward.