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Book by Aristotle

This article is about the treatise by Aristotle. For the theory of literary forms and discourse, see Poetics. For other uses, see Poetics (disambiguation).

Aristotle's Poetics (Ancient Greek: Περὶ ποιητικῆςPeri poietikês; Latin: De Poetica;^[1]c. 335 BCE^[2]) is the earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to solely focus on literary theory.^[3]: ix In this text, Aristotle offers an account of ποιητική, which refers to poetry, and more literally, "the poetic art", deriving from the term for "poet; author; maker", ποιητής. Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and epic. The genres all share the function of mimesis, or imitation of life, but differ in three ways that Aristotle describes:

1. There are differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter, and melody.
2. There is
3. 

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Aristotle's Poetics seeks to address the different kinds of poetry, the structure of a good poem, and the division of a poem into its component parts. He defines poetry as a 'medium of imitation' that seeks to represent or duplicate life through character, emotion, or action. Aristotle defines poetry very broadly, including epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, and even some kinds of music.

According to Aristotle, tragedy came from the efforts of poets to present men as 'nobler,' or 'better' than they are in real life. Comedy, on the other hand, shows a 'lower type' of person, and reveals humans to be worse than they are in average. Epic poetry, on the other hand, imitates 'noble' men like tragedy, but only has one type of meter - unlike tragedy, which can have several - and is narrative in form.

Aristotle lays out six elements of tragedy: plot, character, diction, thought, specta

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CriticaLink | Aristotle: Poetics | Overview

Like many important documents in the history of philosophy and literary theory, Aristotle's Poetics, composed around 330 BCE, was most likely preserved in the form of students' lecture notes. This brief ord, through its various interpretations and applications from the Renaissance onward, has had a profound impact on Western aesthetic philosophy and artistic production.

The Poetics is in part Aristotle's response to his teacher, Plato, who argues in The Republic that poetry is representation of mere appearances and is thus misleading and morally suspect. Aristotle's approach to the phenomenon of poetry fryst vatten quite different from Plato's. Fascinated bygd the intellectual challenge of forming categories and organizing them into coherent systems, Aristotle approaches literary texts as a natural forskare, carefully accounting for the features of each "species" of ord. Rather than concluding that poets should be banished from the perfec