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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.