The Poetics of Aristotle
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~15,400 words · 73 passages
Cite this work
- APAAristotle. (n.d.). The Poetics of Aristotle. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/the-poetics-of-aristotle
- MLAAristotle. "The Poetics of Aristotle." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/the-poetics-of-aristotle.
- ChicagoAristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/the-poetics-of-aristotle.
What it is about
The first theory of literature: what tragedy is and how it works — plot before character, reversal and recognition, and the purging of pity and fear that the audience takes away.
Context and history
Lyceum notes, around 335 BC, written when the great Attic tragedy was already history and could be studied coolly. Of its two parts, on tragedy and on comedy, the second was lost — the most celebrated absence in literature, to the point that Umberto Eco made it the motive of 'The Name of the Rose'. No text has ruled so long over how stories are told: the three unities of French classicism, Hollywood's screenwriting manuals and half the vocabulary of criticism — catharsis, peripeteia, anagnorisis — come out of these pages.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of 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 which come first. Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also a