Poetics

Summary

The Poetics is Aristotle's short treatise on the art of poetry, chiefly tragedy and epic, and the oldest surviving work of literary theory in the West. It opens by defining all poetry, together with music and dance, as imitation (mimesis), and by distinguishing the arts according to the medium of imitation (rhythm, language, melody), the objects imitated (people better than us, worse, or like us), and the manner (narration or enactment). Chapter IV traces poetry to two natural causes: the human instinct to imitate, by which children learn, and the pleasure everyone takes in imitations, even of things painful to see, because learning is delightful. Aristotle then sketches how tragedy grew from the dithyramb and comedy from phallic songs, and how Aeschylus added a second actor and Sophocles a third. Chapter VI gives the famous definition: tragedy imitates an action that is serious, complete and of some magnitude, in embellished language, in dramatic rather than narrative form, through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions. It names six parts: plot, character, thought, diction, song and spectacle, and ranks plot first, the soul of tragedy. Chapters VII to XI require a plot to be whole, with a beginning, middle and end; of a length the memory can hold; and unified by a single action rather than a single hero. Chapter IX argues that poetry is more philosophical than history because it shows what such a person would probably or necessarily do. Complex plots turn on reversal (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis), with Sophocles' Oedipus the King as the chief example. Chapter XIII describes the best tragic hero: a man neither supremely good nor wicked who falls through some great error (hamartia). Chapter XIV asks that pity and fear arise from the structure of events rather than from spectacle, and Chapter XV that characters be good, appropriate, lifelike and consistent, with resolutions coming from the plot, not a god from the machine. Chapters XIX to XXII treat thought and diction, praising command of metaphor as the mark of genius. Chapters XXIII and XXIV compare epic with tragedy and praise Homer for speaking little in his own voice; Chapter XXV answers critics' objections to poets; Chapter XXVI concludes that tragedy is the higher form. A promised discussion of comedy is lost. Little read in antiquity, the treatise passed through Arabic and Latin translations and became, after its Renaissance printing, the founding text of neoclassical criticism. The library text is S. H. Butcher's public-domain translation, first published in 1895.

Plot or Argument

• Chapters I-III: Poetry as imitation

  All poetry, music and dance are kinds of imitation, distinguished by medium, object and manner; drama imitates people acting, and comedy and tragedy differ in imitating worse or better people.

• Chapters IV-V: Origins of poetry, tragedy and comedy

  Poetry springs from the instinct to imitate and the pleasure of learning from imitations; tragedy develops from the dithyramb, comedy from phallic song, and the ludicrous is defined as a harmless ugliness.

• Chapter VI: The definition and six parts of tragedy

  Tragedy is defined as a serious, complete action producing catharsis through pity and fear; plot, character, thought, diction, song and spectacle are ranked, with plot as the soul of the work.

• Chapters VII-XI: The well-made plot

  A plot must be whole and of proper magnitude, unified by one action; poetry deals in universals; plots are simple or complex, and the complex turn on reversal and recognition, with suffering as a third element.

• Chapters XII-XIV: The tragic action and the tragic emotions

  After the quantitative parts (prologue, episode, exode, choral songs), Aristotle sets out the best plot: a change from good to bad fortune through hamartia, with pity and fear arising from the events themselves, best of all when a dreadful deed among kin is about to be done in ignorance and is prevented by recognition.

• Chapters XV-XVIII: Character and practical rules

  Characters must be good, appropriate, true to life and consistent; resolutions should not depend on the deus ex machina; recognitions are graded; the poet should visualize scenes, sketch the general outline, and handle complication and unravelling well.

• Chapters XIX-XXII: Thought and diction

  Thought belongs to rhetoric; diction is analysed from letters to kinds of words; clarity without meanness comes from mixing current words with strange ones, and the command of metaphor cannot be taught.

• Chapters XXIII-XXVI: Epic, criticism and the comparison of forms

  Epic shares tragedy's unity of action but differs in length and metre; Homer is the model; critics' objections are answered by five kinds of defence; and tragedy is judged superior to epic for its concentration and vividness.

Characters

• Homer, epic poet

  Aristotle's model poet, praised for unifying the Iliad and Odyssey around single actions and for speaking little in his own person.

• Sophocles, tragic poet

  Author of Oedipus the King, the treatise's chief example of reversal and recognition.

• Euripides, tragic poet

  Called the most tragic of the poets for his unhappy endings, though faulted in other respects.

• Aeschylus, tragic poet

  Credited with adding the second actor and reducing the chorus.

• Agathon, tragic poet

  Cited for inventing a plot with wholly invented names and for choral odes unconnected to the action.

Lessons

• Plot as the soul of drama

  Aristotle ranks the arrangement of incidents above character, because tragedy imitates action and life, and happiness and misery consist in action. A play of fine speeches without a well-built plot will move an audience less than a plainer play with one. The lesson for readers is to watch how events cause one another.

  • Why does Aristotle say a tragedy can exist without character but not without action?
  • What is the difference between events that happen one after another and events that happen because of one another?
  • Can you name a story you love whose power depends more on character than on plot?

• Poetry and the universal

  In Chapter IX history tells what Alcibiades did, while poetry shows what a certain kind of person would probably or necessarily do. For that reason Aristotle calls poetry more philosophical than history. Fiction, on this view, is a way of knowing human nature, not a holiday from truth.

  • What does Aristotle mean by the universal and the particular?
  • Is a novel or a play ever truer than a history book? In what sense?

• The tragic error

  Aristotle's best tragic hero is neither a saint nor a villain but someone like us, highly placed, who falls through hamartia, a great error or frailty. A good man ruined without cause shocks us, and a bad man ruined satisfies justice but stirs no pity. Scholars still debate whether hamartia means a mistake of fact, as with Oedipus's ignorance, or a flaw of character.

  • Why would the fall of a perfectly good man fail, in Aristotle's view, to produce pity and fear?
  • Is Oedipus's hamartia his ignorance of his parents, his temper, or both?
  • How does the debate over hamartia change the way you read a tragedy?

• Pity, fear and catharsis

  Aristotle says tragedy works through pity and fear to bring about catharsis of those emotions, and that the effect should come from the story itself, so that even hearing the tale of Oedipus makes one shudder. He never explains catharsis in the Poetics, and readers have taken it as purgation, purification, or clarification. The treatise treats emotion as something art can educate rather than simply excite.

  • Why does Aristotle prefer pity and fear produced by plot to those produced by spectacle?
  • Which reading of catharsis, purgation, purification or clarification, best fits a tragedy you have read?

Context

Aristotle wrote in fourth-century BC Athens, a century after the great age of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, when their tragedies were revived and read and the festival of Dionysus still staged new plays. His teacher Plato had banished most poets from the ideal city of the Republic (Books III and X) as imitators at a third remove from truth who feed the passions. The Poetics is widely read as a reply: imitation is natural, a source of learning, and tragedy can order the emotions it rouses.

Composition

The treatise is usually dated to Aristotle's second Athenian period, after 335 BC, and seems to be lecture notes; it is compressed, sometimes obscure, and refers to a discussion of comedy that does not survive. It reached the medieval world through a Syriac and then an Arabic translation (Abu Bishr Matta, 10th century), commented on by Averroes, and a Latin translation by William of Moerbeke (1278). Giorgio Valla's Latin version appeared in 1498 and the Greek text in the Aldine Rhetores Graeci of 1508. S. H. Butcher's text and translation, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, was first published in 1895 and revised in later editions.

Reception

Sixteenth-century Italian commentators such as Robortello (1548) and Castelvetro (1570) made the Poetics the basis of neoclassical criticism; Castelvetro's rules of unity of time and place, added to Aristotle's unity of action, shaped French classical drama under Corneille and Racine. Later critics questioned that rule-book reading, and modern scholars have debated its key terms. Its vocabulary of plot, reversal, recognition, catharsis and the tragic hero remains basic to the teaching of literature and drama.

Comparisons

• the-theban-plays

  Oedipus the King is Aristotle's model tragedy: its messenger scene joins reversal and recognition, and its hero falls by hamartia.

• the-oresteia

  Aeschylus' trilogy shows the older form Aristotle describes, with a large chorus, few actors and the recognition of Orestes by Electra, which the Poetics discusses.

• the-iliad

  Aristotle praises Homer for building the Iliad around one action rather than the whole Trojan War, and uses Homeric epic to define the epic form.

• the-republic

  Plato's critique of poetry as imitation that inflames the passions is the challenge the Poetics answers with its account of mimesis and catharsis.

• medea-and-other-plays

  Aristotle cites Medea's escape in the dragon chariot as an example of the deus ex machina he wants poets to avoid.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The three ways of dividing the arts in Chapters I-III: by medium, by object and by manner of imitation.
• The definition of tragedy at the start of Chapter VI and the ranking of its six parts.
• The contrast between poetry and history in Chapter IX and the example of Alcibiades.
• How often Oedipus the King is cited as the model of reversal, recognition and well-placed horror (Chapters XI, XIV, XVI).
• The closing debate in Chapter XXVI over whether epic or tragedy is the higher art.

Key terms and names

Mimesis

Imitation or representation; Aristotle treats it as natural to humans and the common principle of all the poetic arts.

Catharsis

The effect tragedy produces through pity and fear, translated by Butcher as purgation; its exact meaning is debated.

Peripeteia

Reversal of the situation, a change of the action into its opposite, as when the messenger who comes to cheer Oedipus reveals his parentage.

Anagnorisis

Recognition, a change from ignorance to knowledge, best when it coincides with reversal.

Hamartia

The great error or frailty by which the best tragic hero falls; scholars dispute whether it means a mistake or a flaw.

Deus ex machina

The god lowered by the stage crane to resolve a plot; Aristotle wants resolutions to arise from the plot itself.

Unity of action

Aristotle's requirement that a plot imitate one whole action; the further unities of time and place were added by Renaissance critics.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What are the six parts of tragedy in Chapter VI, and how does Aristotle rank them?
2. Comprehension According to Chapter XIII, why should the tragic hero be neither very good nor very bad?
3. Comprehension What two causes of poetry does Aristotle name in Chapter IV?
4. Interpretation Aristotle says Homer's Iliad has unity because it treats one action, not the whole war. What does he think makes a story one story?
5. Interpretation Is the Poetics an answer to Plato's banishment of the poets? Where does it seem to reply most directly?
6. Interpretation Why does Aristotle prefer probable events to merely possible ones, even preferring a probable impossibility?
7. Big Question Can watching or reading about suffering make a person better? What would it have to do to the emotions?
8. Big Question If poetry shows the universal, what can stories teach about human nature that facts alone cannot?

Faith Connections

• 2 Samuel 12:1-7 (Scripture)

  Nathan's parable of the ewe lamb moves David to pity and anger and then turns on him with a recognition, Thou art the man, a story that brings its hearer to self-knowledge much as Aristotle's recognition scenes do.

• Genesis 45:1-15 (Scripture)

  Joseph's revelation of himself to his brothers is one of the great recognition scenes of ancient literature, and it turns what might have been a tragedy of revenge into reconciliation.

• Augustine, Confessions III.2 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine asks why he loved to weep at stage tragedies and wants to feel sorrow without suffering, a Christian questioning of the very pleasure in pity that Aristotle defends.

• Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (Great Conversation)

  Sidney cites Aristotle to argue that the poet surpasses the historian and the philosopher by joining the general precept to the particular example.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: All poetry is imitation, and imitation is natural and a source of learning. Tragedy imitates an action, and happiness and misery lie in action, so the plot is its most important part. The best plot is whole, unified, probable and complex, moving through reversal and recognition to the fall of a man like us by error, so that pity and fear arise from the events themselves. Therefore tragedy, properly made, is a form of understanding as well as of pleasure, and stands higher than epic.

Rhetorical device: definition by genus and difference. Chapter VI defines tragedy as a kind of imitation (the genus) and then adds its differences: serious, complete, of magnitude, in embellished language, in dramatic form, working through pity and fear.

Debate: Resolved: that a well-constructed plot matters more to a story than its characters.

Memory Work

Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Test Aristotle's account of the ideal tragic hero in Chapter XIII against a tragedy you have read. Does the hero fall through error, flaw, or neither, and does the play produce pity and fear as Aristotle predicts?

Comparison with The Theban Plays: Read Oedipus the King with Chapters XI, XIII and XIV of the Poetics. Argue whether Aristotle's analysis captures what makes the play great, or whether something important escapes his categories.

Medical Lens

The medical interest of the Poetics lies almost entirely in one word. Katharsis was a term of Greek medicine for the evacuation of morbid matter, as in Hippocratic purges, and of religious purification; Aristotle uses it in the definition of tragedy without explanation, though in Politics VIII he says that music produces a catharsis in people seized by enthusiasm, as if by a medical treatment, and promises to explain the term in the Poetics. In 1857 the classical philologist Jacob Bernays argued that Aristotle meant a quasi-medical purgation of pity and fear, and his reading became the standard one in the German-speaking world. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud later called their treatment of hysteria by recollection and abreaction the cathartic method; Freud's wife Martha was Bernays's niece, though how far his reading shaped their choice of term is a matter of interpretation. Other scholars read catharsis as moral purification or intellectual clarification, and the question remains open. Chapter IV's remark that we enjoy accurate images of corpses because learning is pleasant also touches the old link between pleasure and understanding in the viewing of the painful.

• Chapter VI

  The definition of tragedy ends with pity and fear accomplishing catharsis of such emotions, the phrase behind the medical and psychological readings.

  Philosophy AS Therapy Mind Body
• Chapter IV

  Aristotle explains why people delight in exact likenesses of things painful to see, such as the lowest animals and dead bodies: learning gives pleasure.

  Mind Body
• Chapter XIV

  Pity and fear should come from the plot itself, so that merely hearing the story of Oedipus makes the listener shudder and pity; spectacle that produces only the monstrous is rejected.

  Philosophy AS Therapy

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Take a film or novel the class knows and map it onto Aristotle's terms: beginning, middle and end; reversal; recognition; hamartia. Where does it fit and where does it resist?

• Essay

  Defend or challenge Aristotle's claim in Chapter IX that poetry is more philosophical than history, using one history and one tragedy you have read.

• Dialogue

  Write a dialogue between Plato and Aristotle on whether tragedy should be allowed in a well-ordered city, drawing on Republic X and Poetics VI.

Further Reading

• Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, S. H. Butcher

  The translator's own critical essays, printed with his text and translation.

• Aristotle's Poetics, Stephen Halliwell

• The Republic, Plato

  Books III and X contain the critique of poetry that the Poetics answers.

• Studies on Hysteria, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud

  The cathartic method in clinical practice.