Poetics

Introduction

The Poetics is Aristotle's short treatise on tragedy and epic, and the founding work of Western literary theory. At approximately 12,000 words in Greek — the shortest of Aristotle's major treatises — it has had an influence on Western literary criticism, dramatic theory, and aesthetic theory out of all proportion to its length. The categories it introduced (plot, character, diction, mimesis, catharsis, the tragic flaw) remain the basic vocabulary of literary discussion two and a half millennia later.

The Poetics is also one of two Aristotelian responses to Plato's critique of imitative poetry in Republic II–III and X (the other being the Rhetoric). Where Plato had argued that imitative poetry should be excluded from the just city because it appeals to the lower parts of the soul, Aristotle argues that imitation is natural to human beings, intrinsically pleasurable, and a legitimate source of philosophical insight and emotional ordering.

Form, length, date, language

The Poetics as it survives is a treatise in 26 chapters, approximately 12,000 words in Greek. The composition is conventionally placed in Aristotle's second Athenian period at the Lyceum (335–323 BCE). The work appears to be incomplete: Aristotle refers to a planned discussion of comedy that does not appear in the surviving text, and several ancient sources reference a second book of the Poetics on comedy that is now lost. (The loss of the second book is the historical premise of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, 1980.) The original language is Attic Greek.

Why it was written

The Poetics engages two distinct projects. The first is the systematic analysis of poetic composition: what is the structure of a successful tragedy? What distinguishes good plot construction from bad? What makes character compelling? How does poetic language work? The analysis is meant to be useful both to poets composing works and to audiences and critics evaluating them.

The second is the response to Plato. Where Plato had treated imitative poetry as a threat to philosophical and political order, Aristotle defends it as a legitimate human activity with its own proper standards and its own contribution to human flourishing. The two projects are intertwined: the systematic analysis of poetic structure is also the demonstration that poetry has its own rational principles and is not merely an irrational appeal to the lower parts of the soul.

Structure and argument

Chapters 1–5. The general theory of imitation (mimesis). All the imitative arts (tragedy, epic, comedy, dithyramb, music, dance) are forms of imitation; they differ in the medium of imitation, the objects imitated, and the manner of imitation. The chapters provide the taxonomy that organizes the rest of the treatise.

Chapters 6–22. The detailed analysis of tragedy. Aristotle's famous definition: Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious and complete, having a certain magnitude; in language embellished... through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation (catharsis) of these emotions (1449b24–28). The six elements of tragedy in order of importance: plot, character, thought, diction, spectacle, and song. Plot is the most important; the plot is the soul of tragedy.

The analysis of plot is the most extensively developed part of the Poetics. The best plots are complex (involving reversal and recognition rather than simple), unified (with a beginning, middle, and end such that no part can be moved or removed without altering the whole), of appropriate magnitude (neither too short nor too long), and probabilistic in their structure (events follow one another by necessity or likelihood, not by chance).

The famous doctrines of the tragic hero and the tragic flaw belong to this section. The best tragic protagonist is a person like ourselves (capable of attracting our sympathy) who falls into misfortune not through vice or depravity but through some error or frailty (hamartia, sometimes translated as tragic flaw but more accurately as missing the mark).

Chapters 23–26. The treatment of epic poetry and the comparison between epic and tragedy. Aristotle argues that tragedy is the higher form, against the established literary preference for epic. The closing chapter addresses critical objections to poetry.

Key passages

• 1448b4–19 — the natural origins of imitation; humans are the most imitative animals and learn first by imitation.
• 1449b24–28 — the famous definition of tragedy.
• 1450a15–38 — the priority of plot over character.
• 1451a36–1451b11 — the famous distinction between poetry and history: poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history, because poetry speaks more of universals while history speaks of particulars.
• 1452a22–10 — the analysis of reversal (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis).
• 1453a7–17 — the doctrine of the tragic hero and hamartia.
• 1453b1–14 — the discussion of catharsis.

Reception history

The Poetics was little read in late antiquity and largely unknown in the Latin Middle Ages. The Arabic philosophical tradition, especially Averroes's commentary, preserved it through the medieval centuries, though under conditions (no familiarity with Greek tragedy) that produced considerable misunderstanding. The work returned to the Latin West in the Renaissance through new translations: Giorgio Valla's Latin translation (1498) and the Italian humanists' editions made it widely available.

The Renaissance and early modern reception was transformative. The Italian, French, and English critical traditions of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries developed substantially through engagement with the Poetics. The French neoclassical tradition (Boileau, Corneille, Racine) treated the Poetics as authoritative; the famous three unities (of action, time, and place) often attributed to Aristotle were in fact French extrapolations from a stricter reading of the work. The German theoretical tradition through Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–1769) returned to the original text and produced more careful interpretations.

The modern reception has been continuously productive. Friedrich Nietzsche engaged the Poetics in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Twentieth-century literary theory and dramatic theory have continued to draw on the Poetics both as object of historical study and as productive resource. Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is recognizably indebted to it; the Russian Formalists and structuralist narratology developed in dialogue with Aristotle's analysis of plot.

Contemporary engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Stephen Halliwell's The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (1987) and his broader Aristotle's Poetics (1986), Malcolm Heath's translation (Penguin, 1996), the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Poetics (Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray, eds., 2015), and Gerald Else's still-influential Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (1957). Active scholarly debates concern the meaning of catharsis (purgation, clarification, or something else), the interpretation of hamartia, the relation between the Poetics and the contemporary Greek dramatic practice, and the application of Aristotelian categories to non-tragic and non-Greek literary forms.

Further reading

• Aristotle — the author
• Aristotelianism — the tradition
• Mythos — the Greek term for plot, which the Poetics treats technically
• Plato — the philosopher whose critique of poetry the Poetics responds to
• Republic — the Platonic dialogue containing the critique
• Metaphysics — the broader Aristotelian framework

The shortest and most influential work of literary theory in the Western tradition.