PoeticsAristotle
About Poetics
The is the founding document of literary theory in the West, and it survives only in part. What we have is Aristotle's treatment of tragedy, with brief remarks on epic; the promised second book on comedy is lost.
Aristotle defines tragedy as the imitation (mimesis) of a serious and complete action, possessing magnitude, in language with pleasurable accessories, enacted rather than narrated, and achieving through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions. Every key term in this definition has generated centuries of debate, but the structural claims are clear. Plot (mythos) is the soul of tragedy, more important than character, spectacle, or diction. The best plots are complex, involving a reversal of fortune (peripeteia) and a recognition (anagnorisis) that together produce the tragic effect. The hero should be neither perfectly virtuous nor thoroughly vicious but someone like us who falls through some error (hamartia).
Against Plato's attack on poetry in the , Aristotle argues that imitation is natural to human beings, that poetry is more philosophical than history because it deals with universals rather than particulars, and that the emotions aroused by tragedy are not corrupting but purgative. The does not celebrate art for art's sake. It treats poetry as a craft with discoverable principles, analyzable in the same spirit Aristotle brings to biology or ethics.