Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Aristotle on the art of poetry
    Aristotle on the art of poetry
    Aristotle on the art of poetry
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Aristotle on the art of poetry

    By Gilbert Murray, Ingram Bywater and Aristotle

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 25, 2013

    Read more from Gilbert Murray

    Related authors

    Related to Aristotle on the art of poetry

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      I Contain Multitudes

      Apr 19, 2021

      I Contain Multitudes
      1 min read

    • Article

      After Dinner Conversation Magazine – March 2023

      Mar 10, 2023

      This magazine publishes fictional stories that explore ethical and philosophical questions in an informal manner. The purpose of these stories is to generate thoughtful discussion in an open and easily accessible manner. Names, characters, businesses

      1 min read

    • Article

      Picture A Poem

      Sep 1, 2022

      Picture A Poem
      3 min read

    • Article

      POETRY & PATIENCE

      May 27, 2023

      POETRY & PATIENCE
      5 min read

    • Article

      Formal Poetry Is Not a Museum Piece: The Millions Interviews Aaron Poochigian

      Apr 19, 2021

      There was some tension at Columbia over my formalism. I was at one point told not to write that way. Because formal poetry is what lights up my synapses, gets me high, I could not accommodate that suggestion. The post Formal Poetry Is Not a Museum Pi

      11 min read

    • Article

      W.G. Sebald and the Malthusian Tragic

      Mar 28, 2018

      In 1798, an unknown curate named Robert Thomas Malthus published the essay that would give his name to a new breed of anxiety. He argued that the growth rate of the population would always exceed the growth rate of the food supply, inevitably reducin

      14 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Nov 21, 2021

      by Bryan Walpert Mākaro Press — $35 It needs to be made clear that this is a science fiction novel, specifically of the time travel variety. It takes place in three alternating narrative streams, one of which is told in reverse, so that the couple wh

      7 min read

    • Article

      Beyond the Narrative Arc

      Mar 27, 2019

      Beyond the Narrative Arc
      9 min read

    • Article

      Marks of Significance: On Punctuation’s Occult Power

      Jul 31, 2019

      The manipulation of the odd symbols we call letters and punctuation lend themselves to the discovery of greater truths, guideposts to a type of paradise. The post Marks of Significance: On Punctuation’s Occult Power appeared first on The Millions.

      11 min read

    • Article

      And the Walls Came Down

      Oct 22, 2021

      Every word is a metaphor; every phrase, no matter how prosaic, is a poem—even if it's mute. Words don't correspond to reality; they only correspond to one another. All languages are a tapestry of threads forever floating above the ground. The post An

      11 min read

    • Article

      Another Person’s Words: Poetry Is Always the Speaker

      Jul 16, 2019

      More than rhyme and meter, or any other formal aspect, what defines poetry is its self-awareness. Poetry is the language which knows that it’s language. The post Another Person’s Words: Poetry Is Always the Speaker appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      DeLillo, Lethem, and the Seductive Sentence

      Apr 11, 2018

      DeLillo is so famously and distinctively a writer who appeals to sentence-lovers, with all their blindnesses, hubristic ideals, and narrow-minded cerebrations. The post DeLillo, Lethem, and the Seductive Sentence appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      A History And Theory Of The Line In English Language Poetry

      Jul 1, 2022

      For me, and for generations of US readers before me, poetry has been defined by the appearance of the line break on the page, that ragged righthand margin signaling that something is at work in the arrangement of the words on paper beyond mere transc

      59 min read

    • Article

      Theatre Props and Civic Identity in Athens, 458-405 BC

      Jan 23, 2023

      ISBN: 978-1350186477 Bloomsbury (2020) - £28.99 www.bloomsbury.com Modern society is all too aware of the potential that the arts have for exploring contemporary identities and politics. Comedians have always been pointing to the contradictions in pe

      3 min read

    • Article

      Simply Impossible

      Oct 22, 2018

      Simply Impossible
      6 min read

    • Article

      Ambiguities Of The Second Person In English Language Fiction And Poetry

      Mar 1, 2024

      Let’s start with something that really happened. I was at a production of Bertold Brecht’s A Man’s a Man at a small theater in the East Village. During the first act, one of the actors ran off stage, followed by screaming, followed by a voice over th

      38 min read

    • Article

      Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency

      Jul 14, 2017

      I read non-fiction books that I thought might indirectly tell me something about fiction, even though they were really about something else. The post Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Dec 14, 2021

      TWELVE CAESARS: Images of power from the ancient world to the modern By Mary Beard ISBN: 978-0691222363 Princeton University Press (2021) – $35.00 www.press.princeton.edu The Caesars of Rome continue to beguile us. What is perplexing is why the first

      5 min read

    • Article

      What Makes a Poet Difficult?

      May 28, 2019

      What Makes a Poet Difficult?
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Birth Of The Semicolon

      Aug 1, 2019

      The Birth Of The Semicolon
      4 min read

    • Article

      Shaking off Late-Summer Hebetude

      Sep 7, 2017

      I’m not normally much of a napper. But something about these late-summer Sunday afternoons has made it seem more appealing than usual to stretch out for a few minutes – just a few, really – on the living room sofa. I may not even fall asleep. Except

      2 min read

    Reviews for Aristotle on the art of poetry

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Aristotle on the art of poetry - Gilbert Murray

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poetics, by Aristotle

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: The Poetics

      Author: Aristotle

      Commentator: Gilbert Murray

      Translator: Ingram Bywater

      Release Date: May 2, 2009 [EBook #6763]

      Last Updated: January 22, 2013

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POETICS ***

      Produced by Eric Eldred, and David Widger

      ON THE ART OF POETRY

      By Aristotle

      Translated By Ingram Bywater

      With A Preface By Gilbert Murray

           Oxford At The Clarendon Press

           First Published 1920

           Reprinted 1925, 1928, 1932, 1938, 1945, 1947

           1951, 1954, 1959. 1962 Printed In Great Britain

      CONTENTS

      PREFACE

      ARISTOTLE ON THE ART OF POETRY

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

      8

      9

      10

      11

      12

      13    

      14

      15

      16

      17

      18

      19

      20

      21

      22

      23

      24

      25

      26

      PREFACE

      In the tenth book of the Republic, when Plato has completed his final burning denunciation of Poetry, the false Siren, the imitator of things which themselves are shadows, the ally of all that is low and weak in the soul against that which is high and strong, who makes us feed the things we ought to starve and serve the things we ought to rule, he ends with a touch of compunction: 'We will give her champions, not poets themselves but poet-lovers, an opportunity to make her defence in plain prose and show that she is not only sweet—as we well know—but also helpful to society and the life of man, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. For we shall be gainers, I take it, if this can be proved.' Aristotle certainly knew the passage, and it looks as if his treatise on poetry was an answer to Plato's challenge.

      Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading. They nearly all need study and comment, and at times help from a good teacher, before they yield up their secret. And the Poetics cannot be accounted an exception. For one thing the treatise is fragmentary. It originally consisted of two books, one dealing with Tragedy and Epic, the other with Comedy and other subjects. We possess only the first. For another, even the book we have seems to be unrevised and unfinished. The style, though luminous, vivid, and in its broader division systematic, is not that of a book intended for publication. Like most of Aristotle's extant writing, it suggests the MS. of an experienced lecturer, full of jottings and adscripts, with occasional phrases written carefully out, but never revised as a whole for the general reader. Even to accomplished scholars the meaning is often obscure, as may be seen by a comparison of the three editions recently published in England, all the work of savants of the first eminence, (1) or, still more strikingly, by a study of the long series of misunderstandings and overstatements and corrections which form the history of the Poetics since the Renaissance.

      (1) Prof. Butcher, 1895 and 1898; Prof. Bywater, 1909; and Prof. Margoliouth, 1911.

      But it is of another cause of misunderstanding that I wish principally to speak in this preface. The great edition from which the present translation is taken was the fruit of prolonged study by one of the greatest Aristotelians of the nineteenth century, and is itself a classic among works of scholarship. In the hands of a student who knows even a little Greek, the translation, backed by the commentary, may lead deep into the mind of Aristotle. But when the translation is used, as it doubtless will be, by readers who are quite without the clue provided by a knowledge of the general habits of the Greek language, there must arise a number of new difficulties or misconceptions.

      To understand a great foreign book by means of a translation is possible enough where the two languages concerned operate with a common stock of ideas, and belong to the same period of civilization. But between ancient Greece and modern England there yawn immense gulfs of human history; the establishment and the partial failure of a common European religion, the barbarian invasions, the feudal system, the regrouping of modern Europe, the age of mechanical invention, and the industrial revolution. In an average page of French or German philosophy nearly all the nouns can be translated directly into exact equivalents in English; but in Greek that is not so. Scarcely one in ten of the nouns on the first few pages of the Poetics has an exact English equivalent. Every proposition has to be reduced to its lowest terms of thought and then re-built. This is a difficulty which no translation can quite deal with; it must be left to a teacher who knows Greek. And there is a kindred difficulty which flows from it. Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle. I have sometimes played with the idea that a ruthlessly literal translation, helped out by bold punctuation, might be the best. For instance, premising that the words poesis, poetes mean originally 'making' and 'maker', one might translate the first paragraph of the Poetics thus:—

      MAKING: kinds of making: function of each, and how the Myths ought to be put together if the Making is to go right.

      Number of parts: nature of parts: rest of same inquiry.

      Begin in order of nature from first principles.

      Epos-making, tragedy-making (also comedy), dithyramb-making (and most fluting and harping), taken as a whole, are really not Makings but Imitations. They differ in three points; they imitate (a) different objects, (b) by different means, (c) differently (i.e. different manner).

      Some artists imitate (i.e. depict) by shapes and colours. (Obs. sometimes by art, sometimes by habit.) Some by voice. Similarly the above arts all imitate by rhythm, language, and tune, and these either (1) separate or (2) mixed.

      Rhythm and tune alone, harping, fluting, and other arts with same effect—e.g. panpipes.

      Rhythm without tune: dancing. (Dancers imitate characters, emotions, and experiences by means of rhythms expressed in form.)

      Language alone (whether prose or verse, and one form of verse or many): this art has no name up to the present (i.e. there is no name to cover mimes and dialogues and any similar imitation made in iambics, elegiacs, &c. Commonly people

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1