Aristotle's Poetics ( Peri poietikês; ; ) is the earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. In this text, Aristotle offers an account of ποιητική, which refers to poetry, and more literally, "the poetic art," deriving from the term for "poet; author; maker," ποιητής. Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and epic. The genres all share the function of mimesis, or imitation of life, but differ in three ways that Aristotle describes: The surviving book of Poetics is primarily concerned with drama; the analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although the text is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about [t]his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions." Of scholarly debates on the Poetics, four have been most prominent. These include the meanings of catharsis and hamartia, the Classical unities, and the question why Aristotle appears to contradict himself between chapters 13 and 14.

Background

Aristotle's work on aesthetics consists of the Poetics, Politics (Bk VIII), and Rhetoric. The Poetics was lost to the Western world for a long time. The text was restored to the West in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by Averroes. The accurate Greek-Latin translation made by William of Moerbeke in 1278 was virtually ignored. At some point during antiquity, the original text of the Poetics was divided in two, each "book" written on a separate roll of papyrus. Only the first part—that which focuses on tragedy and epic (as a quasi-dramatic art, given its definition in Ch. 23)—survives. The lost second part addressed comedy. Some scholars speculate that the Tractatus coislinianus summarises the contents of the lost second book.

Overview

The table of contents page of the Poetics found in Modern Library's Basic Works of Aristotle (2001) identifies five basic parts within it.

<ol type="A"> <li>Preliminary discourse on tragedy, epic poetry, and comedy, as the chief forms of imitative poetry.</li> <li>Definition of a tragedy, and the rules for its construction. Definition and analysis into qualitative parts.</li> <li>Rules for the construction of a tragedy: Tragic pleasure, or [catharsis](https://bliptext.com/articles/catharsis) experienced by fear and pity should be produced in the spectator. The characters must be four things: good, appropriate, realistic, and consistent. [Discovery](https://bliptext.com/articles/discovery-fiction) must occur within the plot. Narratives, stories, structures, and poetics overlap. It is important for the poet to visualize all of the scenes when creating the plot. The poet should incorporate complication and [dénouement](https://bliptext.com/articles/d-nouement) within the story, as well as combine all of the elements of [tragedy](https://bliptext.com/articles/tragedy). The poet must express thought through the characters' words and actions, while paying close attention to [diction](https://bliptext.com/articles/diction) and how a character's spoken words express a specific idea. Aristotle believed that all of these different elements had to be present in order for the poetry to be well-done.</li> <li>Possible criticisms of an epic or tragedy, and the answers to them.</li> <li>Tragedy as artistically superior to epic poetry: Tragedy has everything that the epic has, even the epic meter being admissible. The reality of presentation is felt in the play as read, as well as in the play as acted. The tragic imitation requires less time for the attainment of its end. If it has more concentrated effect, it is more pleasurable than one with a large admixture of time to dilute it. There is less unity in the imitation of the epic poets (plurality of actions) and this is proved by the fact that an epic poem can supply enough material for several tragedies.</li> </ol> Aristotle also draws a famous distinction between the tragic mode of poetry and the type of history-writing practiced among the Greeks. Whereas history deals with things that took place in the past, tragedy concerns itself with what might occur, or could be imagined to happen. History deals with particulars, whose relation to one another is marked by contingency, accident, or chance. Contrariwise, poetic narratives are determined objects, unified by a plot whose logic binds up the constituent elements by necessity and probability. In this sense, he concluded, such poetry was more philosophical than history was in so far as it approximates to a knowledge of [universals](https://bliptext.com/articles/universal-metaphysics).

Synopsis

Aristotle distinguishes between the genres of "poetry" in three ways: Having examined briefly the field of "poetry" in general, Aristotle proceeds to his definition of tragedy: Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements [used] separately in the [various] parts [of the play] and [represented] by people acting and not by narration, accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions. By "embellished speech", I mean that which has rhythm and melody, i.e. song. By "with its elements separately", I mean that some [parts of it] are accomplished only by means of spoken verses, and others again by means of song. He then identifies the "parts" of tragedy: He offers the earliest-surviving explanation for the origins of tragedy and comedy: Anyway, arising from an improvisatory beginning (both tragedy and comedy—tragedy from the leaders of the dithyramb, and comedy from the leaders of the phallic processions which even now continue as a custom in many of our cities)...

Influence

The Arabic version of Aristotle's Poetics that influenced the Middle Ages was translated from a Greek manuscript dated to some time prior to the year 700. This manuscript, translated from Greek to Syriac, is independent of the currently-accepted 11th-century source designated Paris 1741. The Syriac-language source used for the Arabic translations departed widely in vocabulary from the original Poetics and it initiated a misinterpretation of Aristotelian thought that continued through the Middle Ages. The scholars who published significant commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics included Avicenna, Al-Farabi, and Averroes. Many of these interpretations sought to use Aristotelian theory to impose morality on the Arabic poetic tradition. In particular, Averroes added a moral dimension to the Poetics by interpreting tragedy as the art of praise and comedy as the art of blame. Averroes' interpretation of the Poetics was accepted by the West, where it reflected the "prevailing notions of poetry" the 16th century. Giorgio Valla's 1498 Latin translation of Aristotle's text (the first to be published) was included with the 1508 Aldine printing of the Greek original as part of an anthology of Rhetores graeci. By the early decades of the sixteenth century, vernacular versions of Aristotle's Poetics appeared, culminating in Lodovico Castelvetro's Italian editions of 1570 and 1576. Italian culture produced the great Renaissance commentators on Aristotle's Poetics, and in the baroque period Emanuele Tesauro, with his Cannocchiale aristotelico, re-presented to the world of post-Galilean physics Aristotle's poetic theories as the sole key to approaching the human sciences. Recent scholarship has challenged whether Aristotle focuses on literary theory per se (given that not one poem exists in the treatise) or whether he focuses instead on dramatic musical theory that only has language as one of the elements. The lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics is a core plot element in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose.

Core terms

Editions – commentaries – translations

Sources