Hilal Kaya 1

ARISTOTLE’S POETICS

Sections Included: Introduction, Poetry as Imitation, The Anthropology

and History of Poetry: Tragedy and Comedy

Hilal Kaya
Prof. Dr. Ayten Coşkunoğlu Bear
04/10/2010

Who is Aristotle?
His Life:
Aristotle was born in 384 B.C., at Stagira in northern Greece. His father Nicomachus, a doctor
who had been employed by the Macedonian King Amyntas II, died, leaving his son to the
care of a guardian named Proxenus. He became a student in Academy of Plato when he
moved to Athens in 367 B.C. The school of Plato, Academy, was intended to provide a
general education with a mathematical basis. There were discussions and teaching at
Academy. Aristotle stayed in Athens for the next 20 years. After Plato’s death, Aristotle left
Athens and went to Atarneus, on the coast of Asia Minor. He stayed in Assos 1 and spent his
time in philosophy. In 343, Philip II, King of Macedon, invited Aristotle to his court at Mieza2
and to tutorship of his son, Alexander3. In 335 Aristotle returned to Athens and instead of
joining the Academy, which was flourishing under a new head, he preferred to set up an
establishment of his own, Lyceum. For the last days of his life, Aristotle retired to Chalcis, on
the island of Euboea and he died there at the age of 62.

His Works and Thought:

His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre,
music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. The works of
Aristotle fall under three headings: (1) dialogues and other works of a popular character; (2)
collections of facts and material from scientific treatment; and (3) systematic works. Among
his writings of a popular nature the only one which we possess of any consequence is the
interesting tract On the Polity of the Athenians. The works on the second group include 200
titles, most in fragments, collected by Aristotle’s school and used as research. Some may have
been done at the time of Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus. Included in this group are
constitutions of 158 Greek states. The systematic treatises of the third group are marked by a
1
Behramkale, Çanakkale.
2
Village in Ancient Macedon, where Aristotle taught the boy Alexander the Great.
3
Alexander the Great.
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plainness of style, with none of the golden flow of language which the ancients praised in
Aristotle. This may be due to the fact that these works were not, in most cases, published by
Aristotle himself or during his lifetime, but were edited after his death from unfinished
manuscripts. Until Werner Jaeger (1912) it was assumed that Aristotle’s writings presented a
systematic account of his views. Jaeger argues for an early, middle and late period (genetic
approach), where the early period follows Plato’s theory of forms and soul, the middle rejects
Plato, and the later period (which includes most of his treatises) is more empirically oriented.
Aristotle’s systematic treatises may be grouped in several divisions:

 Logic
1. Categories (10 classifications of terms)
2. On Interpretation (propositions, truth, modality)
3. Prior Analytics (syllogistic logic)
4. Posterior Analytics (scientific method and syllogism)
5. Topics (rules for effective arguments and debate)
6. On Sophistical Refutations (informal fallacies)
 Physical works
1. Physics (explains change, motion, void, time)
2. On the Heavens (structure of heaven, earth, elements)
3. On Generation (through combining material constituents)
4. Meteorologics (origin of comets, weather, disasters)
 Psychological works
1. On the Soul (explains faculties, senses, mind, imagination)
2. On Memory, Reminiscence, Dreams, and Prophesying
 Works on natural history
1. History of Animals (physical/mental qualities, habits)
2. On the parts of Animals
3. On the Movement of Animals
4. On the Progression of Animals
5. On the Generation of Animals
6. Minor treatises
7. Problems
 Philosophical works
1. Metaphysics (substance, cause, form, potentiality)
2. Nicomachean Ethics (soul, happiness, virtue, friendship)
3. Eudemain Ethics
4. Magna Moralia
5. Politics (best states, utopias, constitutions, revolutions)
6. Rhetoric (elements of forensic and political debate)
7. Poetics (tragedy, epic poetry)

His Art and Poetics:

Art is defined by Aristotle as the realization in external form of a true idea, and is
traced back to that natural love of imitation which characterizes humans, and to the pleasure
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which we feel in recognizing likenesses. Art however is not limited to mere copying. It
idealizes nature and completes its deficiencies: it seeks to grasp the universal type in the
individual phenomenon. The distinction therefore between poetic art and history is not that
the one uses meter, and the other does not. The distinction is that while history is limited to
what has actually happened, poetry depicts things in their universal character. And, therefore,
“poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history.” Such imitation may represent
people either as better or as worse than people usually are, or it may neither go beyond nor
fall below the average standard. Comedy is the imitation of the worse examples of humanity,
understood however not in the sense of absolute badness, but only in so far as what is low and
ignoble enters into what is laughable and comic. Tragedy, on the other hand, is the
representation of a serious or meaningful, rounded or finished, and more or less extended or
far-reaching action - a representation which is effected by action and not mere narration. It is
fitted by portraying events which excite fear and pity in the mind of the observer to purify or
purge these feelings and extend and regulate their sympathy. It is thus a homeopathic curing
of the passions. Insofar as art in general universalizes particular events, tragedy, in depicting
passionate and critical situations, takes the observer outside the selfish and individual
standpoint, and views them in connection with the general lot of human beings. This is similar
to Aristotle’s explanation of the use of orgiastic music in the worship of Bacchus and other
deities: it affords an outlet for religious fervour and thus steadies one’s religious sentiments.

Aristotle’s Poetics

Aristotle’s Poetics should not be supposed that it is confined to a discussion of merely

tragedy. The work as we have it today is incomplete. Aristotle wrote a second book, on
comedy, which has been lost. As we now possess it, the Poetics is exhausted by its first book,
which divides into four unequal sections: (i) an introduction to the notion of mimesis,
imitation, which divides into several species (in Poetics i-ii); (ii) a treatment of the
development of imitative behaviour, which stresses its natural occurrence in human conduct
(in Poetics iv-v); (iii) a characterisation of tragedy, first defining it as a genre and then
discussing its various aspects, with a dominant concentration on the features of its plot type
(in Poetics vi-xix); and, finally, (iv) treatment of epic poetry which trails off into a loosely
connected set of questions concerning critical reactions to tragedy and the comparative worth
of tragedy and epic (in Poetics xxiii-xxvi).
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Parts i-ii-iii-iv-v:

Aristotle begins with a loose outline of what he will address in the Poetics:

a. the different kinds of poetry and the ‘essential quality’ of each

b. the structure necessary for a ‘good poem’

c. the method in which a poem is divided into parts

d. anything else that might tangentially comes up in his address of the above topics.

But before he begins tackling these topics, Aristotle first seeks to define poetry. Poetry, as
Aristotle defines it, is first and foremost a ‘medium of imitation’, meaning a form of art that
seeks to duplicate or represent life. Poetry can imitate life in a number of ways, by
representing character, emotion, action, or even everyday objects.

(i) Poetry, as Aristotle defines it, includes epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic
poetry, and music (specifically of flute, and lyre). What differentiates these kinds of poetry is
the nature of their ‘imitation’. He notes three differences: the medium, the objects and the
manner or mode of imitation.

i1. Medium of Imitation

In general, poetry imitates life through ‘rhythm’, ‘language’, and ‘harmony’ either singly or
combined. This is more pronounced in music or dance, but even verse poetry can accomplish
imitation through language alone. In music and dance rhythm alone are employed

i2. Object of Imitation

Art seeks to imitate men in action - hence the term ‘drama’ means action (dramitas, in Greek).
In order to imitate men, art must either present man as ‘better’ than they are in life (i.e. of
higher morals), as true to life, or as ‘worse’ than they are in life (i.e. of lower morals).

Each author has his own tendencies - Homer ‘makes men better than they are’, Cleophon ‘as
they are’, Nichochares ‘worse than they are’. But more important is a general distinction that
Aristotle makes between forms of drama: comedy represents men as worse then they are, and
tragedy as better than they are in actual life.
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i3. Manner/Mode of Imitation

A poet can imitate either through:

a. narration, in which he takes another personality (an omniscient ‘I’ watching the events ‘like
an observer’)

b. speak in his own person, unchanged (the first-person ‘I’)

c. presents all his characters as living and moving before us (third-person narrator)

(ii and iii) Continuing on from imitation, Aristotle turns to the anthropology and
history of poetry:

Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our
nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one
difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living
creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the
pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of
experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to
contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most
ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the
liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity,
however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness
is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying
perhaps, 'Ah, that is he. For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will
be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the colouring, or some such
other cause. Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for
'harmony' and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore,
starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude
improvisations gave birth to Poetry.
As Aristotle sees it, poetry emerged for two reasons - 1) man’s instinct to imitate things and
2) the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm.

(iv)Once poetry emerged, it evolved in two directions. One group of poems imitated
‘noble actions’, or the actions of good men. (Epic poetry 4) A second group of poets imitated
‘the actions of meaner persons’ in the form of satire. (Lampoon poetry) The former evolved
into tragedy, the latter into comedy:

Poetry now diverged in two directions, according to the individual character of the
writers. The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of good men. The
more trivial sort imitated the actions of meaner persons, at first composing satires, as the
former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men. A poem of the satirical
kind cannot indeed be put down to any author earlier than Homer; though many such
writers probably there were. But from Homer onward, instances can be cited- his own
Margites, for example, and other similar compositions. The appropriate meter was also

4
All the elements of an Epic poem are found in Tragedy, but the elements of a Tragedy are not all found in the
Epic poem. Those that Epic doesn’t have are Spectacle and Song.
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here introduced; hence the measure is still called the iambic or lampooning measure,
being that in which people lampooned one another. Thus the older poets were
distinguished as writers of heroic or of lampooning verse.
(v) Next, Aristotle elaborates on what he means when he says that comedy deals with
people worse than us ourselves, saying that comedy deals with the ridiculous. He defines the
ridiculous as a kind of ugliness that does no harm to anybody else. Aristotle is able only to
give a very sketchy account of the origins of comedy, because it was not generally treated
with the same respect as tragedy and so there are fewer records of the innovations that led to
its present form:

Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type- not, however,
in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly.
It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an
obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.
The successive changes through which Tragedy passed, and the authors of these
changes, are well known, whereas Comedy has had no history, because it was not at
first treated seriously. It was late before the Archon granted a comic chorus to a poet;
the performers were till then voluntary. Comedy had already taken definite shape
when comic poets, distinctively so called, are heard of. Who furnished it with masks,
or prologues, or increased the number of actors- these and other similar details remain
unknown. As for the plot, it came originally from Sicily; but of Athenian writers
Crates was the first who abandoning the 'iambic' or lampooning form, generalized his
themes and plots. Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in
verse of characters of a higher type. They differ in that Epic poetry admits but one
kind of meter and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy
endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but
slightly to exceed this limit, whereas the Epic action has no limits of time. This, then,
is a second point of difference; though at first the same freedom was admitted in
Tragedy as in Epic poetry. Of their constituent parts some are common to both, some
peculiar to Tragedy: whoever, therefore knows what is good or bad Tragedy,
knows also about Epic poetry. All the elements of an Epic poem are found in
Tragedy, but the elements of a Tragedy are not all found in the Epic poem.

While both tragedy and epic poetry deal with lofty subjects in a grand style of verse,
Aristotle notes three significant differences between the two genres. First, tragedy is told in a
dramatic, rather than narrative, form, and employs several different kinds of verse while epic
poetry employs only one. Second, the action of a tragedy is usually confined to a single day,
and so the tragedy itself is usually much shorter than an epic poem. Third, while tragedy has
all the elements that are characteristic of epic poetry, it also has some additional elements that
are unique to it alone.

Aristotle’s account of the origin of tragedy seems on the whole quite sound. The
sparseness of archaeological and other evidence has long frustrated scholars, but it seems that
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Aristotle’s suggestion that tragedy evolved from the dithyramb5 is as good as any we have.
Dionysus is the Greek god of vegetation and wine, and the dithyrambs in honour of him are
thought to have been part of festivals celebrating the harvest and the changing of the seasons.
These songs were thus part of religious ceremonies, and the speaker that accompanied the
large chorus was probably a priest of some sort. Though initially improvised, these
dithyrambs developed a more rigid structure, and the speaker often engaged in dialogue with
the chorus. Aeschylus is generally credited with the innovation of adding a second actor,
which transformed choral singing into dialogue, ritual into drama. In short, Aeschylus
invented tragedy and is the first great playwright of the Western tradition.

Analyses of ‘i-ii-iii-iv and v’ sections:

The Poetics begins quickly and efficiently, unlike a number of Aristotle’s other works.
Instead of laying out an argument for why the subjects merits such a discussion or an overall
thesis for his investigation, he immediately lays out an outline for his work - types of poetry,
structure, and division - and begins his systematic analysis.

As it is noted, ‘The preliminaries are over in ten lines... Nothing is said about the
purpose of the discussion, what Aristotle hopes to accomplish by it; next to nothing about
method, or the views of others on poetry. But above all we miss something that stands as
preface to every major work of Aristotle’s [best work], namely some general statement by
way of orientation...’ In other words, Aristotle usually presents a ‘notion of the forest’, before
he begins to look at the trees. But not in the Poetics.

The first three chapters of the Poetics are action-packed- nearly every line needs to be
carefully dealt with, since Aristotle presents a myriad of definitions, concepts, and categories.
But the first major issue is to understand involves the term ‘Poetics’ - what does Aristotle
mean by it? Simply put, ‘poetry’ to Aristotle is not the final product, but the art of creating
poetry. To understand this art, we must first grasp a number of important concepts.

The first is ‘imitation’, which is a word used often in the Poetics. ‘Imitation’, as a
concept, refers to an artist’s primary motivation to duplicate or capture life in some form.
Imitation, furthermore, is an innate instinct, says Aristotle, that is ‘implanted in man from

5
The dithyramb was originally an ancient Greek hymn sung to the god Dionysus. Its wild and ecstatic character
was often contrasted with that of the paean: just as Paean was both a hymn to and a title of Apollo, Dithyrambos
was also a title of Dionysus as well as a song in his honour. According to Aristotle, the dithyramb was the origin
of the Ancient Greek theatre.
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childhood’. We use imitation not only for entertainment, but also for learning - by seeing the
fortunes or misfortunes of another, they can internalize experience through vicarious living.

Aristotle also uses imitation to differentiate between tragedy and comedy. In the
former, poets reveal men as better than they are - hence the tragic ‘hero’. It is in this
representation of man as ‘better’ or of ‘higher morality’ that we ultimately find catharsis, the
release at the end of a tragedy. In comedy, however, a poet presents man as worse than he is -
plagued by some defect or ugliness which ultimately takes the reader into a satiric worldview.
Comedy ultimately works in a similar way to tragedy, but with opposite effect: in a tragedy,
we grieve over the fate of a man who must suffer for his flaw, perhaps touched by the
possibility that we too might possess this flaw. But in a comedy, we laugh at the hero’s flaw,
comforted by the fact that it is not ours.