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    Poetics
    Poetics
    Poetics
    Ebook68 pages54 minutes

    Poetics

    By Aristotle

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    In Poetics, Aristotle sets about laying the foundations of critical thought about the arts. One of the most influential books in Western civilization, Poetics reveals not only a great intellect analyzing the nature of poetry, music, and drama, but also a down-to-earth understanding of the practical problems facing the poet and playwright.   
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherImmortal Books
    Release dateApr 30, 2018
    ISBN9781387779178
    Author

    Aristotle

    Aristotle (384–322 BC) was a philosopher and writer from the Classical period in Ancient Greece. His work provides the intellectual methodology of most European-centred civilization, influencing the fundamental forms of all knowledge. Taught by Plato, he wrote on many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, philosophy, politics and the arts.

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      Book preview

      Poetics - Aristotle

      Sophists

      I

      I PROPOSE TO EXAMINE Poetry and its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each; to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly, into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles.

      Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic: poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one: another in three respects, the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.

      For as there are persons who, by conscious art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium of color and form, or again by the voice; so in the arts above mentioned, taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or ‘harmony,’ either singly or combined.

      Thus, in the music of the flute and of the lyre, ‘harmony’ and rhythm alone are employed; also in other arts, such as that of the shepherd’s pipe, which are essentially similar to these. In dancing, rhythm alone is used without ‘harmony;’ for even dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical movement.

      There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse—which, verse, again, may either combine different meters or consist of but one kind—but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar meter. People do, indeed, add the word ‘maker’ or ‘poet’ to the name of the meter, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name.

      Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the meter, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all meters, as Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley composed of meters of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet. So much then for these distinctions.

      There are, again, some arts which employ all the means above mentioned, namely, rhythm, tune, and meter. Such are Dithyrambic and Gnomic poetry, and also Tragedy and Comedy; but between them the difference is, that in the first two cases these means are all employed in combination, in the latter, now one means is employed, now another.

      Such, then, are the differences of the arts with respect to the medium of imitation.

      II

      SINCE THE OBJECTS OF imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble and Dionysius drew them true to life.

      Now it is evident that each of the modes of imitation above mentioned will exhibit these differences, and become a distinct kind in imitating objects that are thus distinct. Such diversities may be found even in dancing, flute playing, and lyre playing. So again in language, whether prose or verse unaccompanied by music. Homer, for example, makes men better than they are; Cleophon as they are; Hegemon the Thasian, the inventor of parodies, and Nicochares, the author of the Deiliad, worse than they are. The same thing holds good of Dithyrambs and Nomes; here too one may portray different types, as Timotheus and Philoxenus differed in representing their Cyclopes. The same distinction marks off Tragedy from Comedy; for Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

      III

      THERE IS STILL A THIRD difference—the manner in

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