greek · literary

Poetics

c. 335 BCE · Classical Greece (4th century BCE) · Athens, Greece (composed at the Lyceum)

Chapter I — On Imitation

1Our subject being Poetry, I propose to speak not only of the art in general,

2but also of its species and their respective capacities;

3of the structure of plot required for a good poem;

4of the number and nature of the parts of a poem;

5and likewise of any other matters in the same line of inquiry.

6Let us therefore, following the natural order, begin from first principles.

7Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry,

8and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms,

9are all in their general conception modes of imitation.

10They differ, however, from one another in three respects—

11the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.

Chapter IV — Origins of Poetry

12Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes,

13each of them lying deep in our nature.

14First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood,

15one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures,

16and through imitation learns his earliest lessons.

17Second, all men take pleasure in works of imitation.

18The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure,

19not only to philosophers but to men in general.

Chapter VI — Definition of Tragedy

20Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious,

21complete, and of a certain magnitude;

22in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament,

23the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play;

24in the form of action, not of narrative;

25through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.

26Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality —

27namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song.

28Two of the parts constitute the medium of imitation, one the manner, and three the objects of imitation.

29And these complete the list.

Plot Above Character

30But most important of all is the structure of the incidents.

31For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life,

32and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.

33Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse.

34Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character:

35character comes in as subsidiary to the actions.

36Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy;

37and the end is the chief thing of all.

Chapter VIII — Unity of Action

38Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero.

39For infinitely various are the incidents in one man's life,

40which cannot be reduced to unity.

41As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one,

42so the plot, being an imitation of an action,

43must imitate one action and that a whole,

44the structural union of the parts being such that,

45if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.

Chapter XI — Reversal and Recognition

46Reversal of the Situation is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite,

47subject always to our rule of probability or necessity.

48Thus in the Oedipus, the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus and free him from his alarms about his mother,

49but by revealing who he is, he produces the opposite effect.

50Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge,

51producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune.

52The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation,

53as in the Oedipus.

Chapter XIII — The Tragic Hero

54The perfect tragic hero must not be a man of outstanding virtue and justice,

55whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgement,

56of one who enjoys prosperity and a high reputation,

57like Oedipus, Thyestes, and other illustrious men of such families.

58The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad.

59It should come about as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty,

60in a character either such as we have described, or better rather than worse.

Chapter XXIII — Epic and Tragedy

61The epic poet should have the same varieties as the tragic:

62his plots must be constructed on dramatic principles,

63with a single action, entire and complete in itself, having a beginning, middle, and end.

64Homer's supremacy is here notable:

65He did not attempt to deal with the war in its entirety,

66though it was a whole with a definite beginning and end.

67Rather, taking one part of the whole as his subject,

68he has used many others in his story as episodes;

69such as the Catalogue of Ships and the various parts of the war.

notes

Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the foundational text of Western literary criticism. Composed around 335 BCE at the Lyceum, it survives in a form that is probably lecture notes rather than a finished treatise — only about half the projected work exists (the book on comedy is lost). The core arguments of the extant book are: the definition of tragedy as an "imitation of an action" that purges pity and fear (the doctrine of catharsis); the six components of tragedy (plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, song) with plot the most important; the theory of the tragic hero as a man of importance brought down by a hamartia (error, frailty, or "tragic flaw"); and the concepts of peripeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis (recognition), of which Aristotle judges Oedipus Rex the perfect exemplar. The Poetics was little read in the Middle Ages but was rediscovered in the Renaissance and became the code of European dramatic theory for the following three centuries — codified in the neoclassical "unities" of action, time, and place (Aristotle himself explicitly requires only unity of action). Translation: S.H. Butcher, "Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art," 3rd edition, London: Macmillan, 1902. Public domain.

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