Aristotle's Poetics (Ancient Greek: Περὶ ποιητικῆς Peri poietikês; Latin: De Poetica; c. 335 BCE) is the earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to solely focus on literary theory. In this text, Aristotle offers an account of ποιητική, which refers to poetry or, 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 poetry. The genres all share the function of mimesis, but differ in:
Musical rhythm, harmony, meter, and melody;
The goodness of the characters; and
The mode of storytelling.
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, "every detail about this seminal work has aroused divergent opinions." A few scholarly debates on the Poetics have been most prominent: the meanings of catharsis and hamartia, the Classical unities, and whether Aristotle contradicts himself between chapters 13 and 14.
Contents
Background
Aristotle's works on aesthetics consist of the Poetics, Politics (Bk VIII), and Rhetoric. The Poetics was lost to the Western world for a long time, but was rediscovered in the West during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance 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 in antiquity, the original text of the Poetics was divided into two, with each "book" written on a separate roll of papyrus. Only the first part, which focuses on tragedy and epic, survives. The lost second part addressed comedy. Some scholars speculate that the Tractatus coislinianus summarizes 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.
Preliminary discourse on tragedy, epic poetry, and comedy as the chief forms of imitative poetry.
Definition of a tragedy, and the rules for its construction. Definition and analysis into qualitative parts.
Rules for the construction of a tragedy: Tragic pleasure, or catharsis experienced by fear and pity should be produced in the spectator. The characters must be four things: good, appropriate, realistic, and consistent. Discovery 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 within the story, as well as combine all of the elements of tragedy. The poet must express thought through the characters' words and actions, while paying close attention to 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.
Possible criticisms of an epic or tragedy and the answers to them.
Tragedy is 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 a 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 (a plurality of actions), and this is proved by the fact that an epic poem can supply enough material for several tragedies.
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. Contrarily, 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 a knowledge of universals.
Synopsis
Aristotle distinguishes between the genres of "poetry" in three ways:
Matter:
Language, rhythm, and melody, for Aristotle, make up the matter of poetic creation. Where the epic poem makes use of language alone, the playing of the lyre involves rhythm and melody. Some poetic forms include a blending of all materials; for example, Greek tragic drama included a singing chorus, and so music and language were all part of the performance.
Recent work, though, argues that translating rhythmos here as "rhythm" is absurd: melody already has its own inherent musical rhythm, and the Greek word can mean what Plato says it means in Laws II, 665a: "(the name of) ordered body movement," or dance. This correctly conveys what dramatic musical creation, the topic of the Poetics, in ancient Greece had: music, dance, and language.
Also, the musical instrument cited in Ch. 1 is not the lyre but the kithara, which was played in the drama while the kithara-player was dancing (in the chorus), even if that meant just walking in an appropriate way. Moreover, the epic might have had only literary exponents, but as Plato's Ion and Aristotle's Ch. 26 of the Poetics help prove, for Plato and Aristotle at least some epic rhapsodes used all three means of mimesis: language, dance (as a pantomimic gesture), and music (if only by chanting the words).
Subjects (Also "agents" in some translations):
Aristotle differentiates between tragedy and comedy throughout the work by distinguishing between the nature of the human characters that populate either form. Aristotle finds that tragedy deals with serious, important, and virtuous people.
Comedy, on the other hand, treats of less virtuous people and focuses on human "weaknesses and foibles". Aristotle introduces here the influential tripartite division of characters: superior (βελτίονας) to the audience, inferior (χείρονας), or at the same level (τοιούτους).
Method:
Influence
The Arabic version of Aristotle's Poetics that influenced the Middle Ages was translated from a Greek manuscript dated to some time before 700 AD. 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" in the 16th century.
Giorgio Valla's 1498 Latin translation of Aristotle's text (the first to be published) was included in a collection of various translations. In 1508, the Aldine Press published the Greek original as part of another anthology, 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 (1980).
The text has also been extensively used by Paul Ricœur in developing his theories of history and notions of metaphor. For his theories on the philosophy of history, this is drawn from the notion of narratives creating some form of imitatio for future generations to follow.
Core terms
Anagnorisis or "recognition", "identification"
Catharsis or, variously, "purgation", "purification", "clarification"
Dianoia or "thought", "theme"
Ethos or "character"
Hamartia or "miscalculation" (understood in Romanticism as "tragic flaw")
Hubris or Hybris, "pride"
Lexis or "diction", "speech"
Melos, or "melody"; also "music-dance" (melos meaning primarily "limb")
Mimesis or "imitation", "representation", or "expression", given that, e.g., music is a form of mimesis, and often there is no music in the real world to be "imitated" or "represented".
Mythos or "plot", defined in Chapter 6 explicitly as the "structure of actions".
Nemesis or, "retribution"
Opsis or "spectacle"
Peripeteia or "reversal"