Speaking Greek

Notes on Aristotle’s Poetics

While some critics primarily consider Poetics a counterattack to Plato’s banishing of poets from [in] the Republic, Aristotle’s treatise on art, poetry, epic, and tragedy clearly marks out the history of literary criticism. Rather than concluding that poets should be banished from the perfect society, as does Plato, Aristotle attempts to describe the social function and the ethical utility of art.

Poetics places emphasis on the formative nature of art—while predecessor Plato esteems idealism and abstractions as the highest forms of truth to gain wisdom, Aristotle stresses the importance or primacy of the particular imitations of nature.

According to Aristotle, criticism should not be simply the application of unexamined aesthetic principles in its context within the work—but should pay attention to the overall function of feature of a work of art. Therefore, Poetics lays bare the anatomy of art, as in a scientist—carefully accounting for the features of each species cited in the text—most forms by the way are the ones that existed during those times.

Exploring the forms of art during Aristotle’s time, Poetics particularly discusses the practical details of the forms of imitation, which he termed mimesis.  The treatment of the forms or modes of representation is meticulous as Aristotle presents as many definitions as the terms themselves. For instance, Aristotle goes into detail, when he cites the types of tragic plots. He also names specific terms to explicate that unity of plot is indispensably necessary. In Book 17, Aristotle gives poets some pointers on how to construct a tragedy—or how tragedy is constructed by playwrights who were awarded in Dionysian festivals.

Especially drawing on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Aristotle cites the six salient parts of tragedy in order of importance—plot, character, thought, diction, music or melody and spectacle.  Zooming in on the good plots, Poetics prefers the plausibility and logically connected order centered on one unified action, simultaneously frowning on multiple, divergent plots which it also deems unnecessary. Poetics suggests that the best kind of resolution to these plots is one that shows a reversal (peripeteia) of position for the main character—and a character’s recognition (anagnorisis) of his or her fate. For best effect, so to speak, characters should come from high positions in order to render remarkable tragic circumstances, and their fates must be linked to their own error, and not some accident or wickedness (hamartia).

According to Norton’s Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Aristotle’s seminal work on art renders us a number of implications for the modern critics.  

First, its systematic categorization of genus and species and its comparison of tragedy and epic are said to now underlie all genre theory—“undergirding modern considerations of the historical movement from epic to the novel. 

Second, its systematic description of plot and its component parts basically ground contemporary narrative theory, especially the technical field of narratology. 

Third, its scientific examination of poetry—championed by the American New Critics—rather just validates it as a legitimate branch of study.  Next, it affirms that poetry is a source of universal knowledge of human behavior, i.e. unlike history that produces knowledge of specific situations, poetry describes actions of characters who might be any human beings.  

Lastly, to which most critics agree, good poetry renders us catharsis, primarily read as purgation of unwieldy emotion. Through time, catharsis, roughly a sense of moral purification that arises in an individual from being exposed to tragedy has come to mean ethical or intellectual clarification.