Aristotle’s Poetics (Part 1)

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was born in Stagira, an ancient Greek city in the central Macedonia. He studied Biology and worked as a teacher. He was the disciple of Plato and joined his academy and remained there for several years. He left the academy shortly after the death of Plato. In 342 BC, he became the mentor of Alexander The Great on the request of Philip II of Macedon. He was the founder of Lyceum, an institution of members who were interested in making philosophical and scientific inquiries. It was a gymnasium sacred to “Apollo Lyceus, the wolf-god”. The institution holds pride in having the famous philosophers as its teachers – Plato, Socrates and Aristotle himself. Aristotle also founded the Peripatetic School; a school of Philosophy. The term ‘Peripatetic’ is used to refer to his followers which is the transliteration of the same in Greek. The term which means ‘to walk’ came into use as Aristotle had a habit of walking while lecturing. The school had its own rise and fall and totally faded away in the third century. He has two major works to his credit, The Poetics and The Rhetoric.

Aristotle is called the first scientific critic and also the first theologist of literature. His work The Poetics is called the storehouse of literary theory. It is the book whose influence has been continuous and universal. His appeal is a scientific one of observation and analytics. Poetics does not say much about comedy but touches rather briefly on the epic. The purpose of his writing The Poetics and The Rhetoric was to sort out those principles from established practice that made for a good poet and a good orator. The Poetics appears to be a late work by Aristotle since it presupposes in the reader a knowledge of the other works by him. It runs to 50 pages and is fragmentary in nature; probably because it could be the collection of notes from lectures. Some of his ideas are seen inadequately and at times are almost incoherently developed. Its not a treatise in a final form but rather jottings of lecture notes.

The work had its first printed Greek version in 1536 followed by the critical edition in 1548. Since then The Poetics is one of the most important critical texts in the study of literature. Aristotle opens the text by outlining the scope of the world dealing with the study of the poetic kinds, i.e. epic poetry, dramatic poetry and lyrical poetry. His conclusion on the nature of the poetry and drama are of general application and are as true today as they were in his own day.

Overview of The Poetics

The poetics is divisible into 6 parts.

• The first five chapters (chap 1-5) deal with the
• Introductory remarks on poetry and its classification into different kinds, including tragedy and comedy.
• A discussion on imitation – ‘mimesis’
• The objects of poetic imitation
• The types of men and activities that are imitated or represented
• Manner of imitation
• Traces the origins and developments of poetry
• The chapters 6-19 are devoted to tragedy. A definition of tragedy is given and its formative elements are discussed.
• The next three chapters (chap 20-22) are devoted to a discussion of poetic diction, style, vocabulary, etc.
• The chapter 23 deals with narrative poetry and tragedy
• The chapters 24-26 deals with the epic in brief and compared with tragedy   
• The chapter 25 examines the objectives of critics against poetry

His Observation on Poetry

The nature and principle of imitation – All arts including poetry, music, painting, dancing is based on imitation. All the artists imitate – their shapes, colors and use of voice. Imitation is produced by the means of – rhythm, language and music either separately or in combinations. Men in action are imitated or represented as either better as in tragedy or worse as in comedy and satire. Based on this, there are two modes of imitation which are narrative and dramatic as seen in an epic poetry. The origin of poetry is based on the principle of imitation and harmony(rhythm). Poetry i.e. either an epic conveyed through a narrator or dramatic which is conveyed through action. This dramatic poetry categorizes itself as tragedy and comedy. A tragedy imitates men as better persons whereas a comedy imitates men as worse. According to him imitation is the common basis for all fine arts differing from each other through – their medium of imitation, objects of imitation and manner of imitation.

Aristotle considers the nature of the poetic art and calls the poet as an imitator. He argues that the poet imitates one of the three objects –

• Things as they are or were; what is present or the past
• Things as they are said or thought to be; what is commonly believed and
• Things as they are to be; what is ideal

He believes in the natural pleasure of imitation which is an inborn instinct in man. He says that a poet or an artist is a grown-up child indulging in imitation for the pleasure it affords. There is another natural instinct helping him to make him a poet, i.e. the instinct for harmony and rhythm manifesting itself in metrical composition. The poet’s imitations or pictures of life are not unreal. On the contrary, they reveal truths of a permanent or a universal kind. Aristotle compares poetics to that of history. He says that “the difference is that one (a historian) writes about what has actually happened, while the other (a poet) deals with what might happen. Hence poetry is more philosophical and deserves more serious attention than history, while poetry concerns itself with universal truths, history considers only particular facts”.