Poetics

“Homer represents people better than us and Cleophon people similar to us, while people worse than us figure in the works of Hegemon of Thasos, the inventor of parodies, and Nicochares who wrote the Deiliad. […] The very same difference makes the distinction between tragedy and comedy: the latter aims to represent people as worse, and the former as better, than people nowadays are.” 

Aristotle’s distinction between types of objects in poetry creates his genre divisions. Here, tragedy, which represents its characters as noble and grand, takes a higher rank than comedy, which is interested in human folly and baseness, in the proverbial pecking order. This implied hierarchy persists in popular thought to this day.

“Two things, both of them natural, seem likely to have been the causes of the origin of poetry. Representation comes naturally to human beings from childhood, and so does the universal pleasure in representations. Indeed, this marks off humans from other animals: man is prone to representation beyond all others, and learns his earliest lessons through representation.” 

In Aristotle’s view, representative art is a natural part of the human experience. Indeed, it’s even a defining trait—the thing separating humans from other animals. Aristotle frames representation as an innate and educational part of life, but also as a pleasurable one: Art isn’t just a tool with which to learn, but a delight.

“…[E]ven when things are painful to look upon—corpses, for instance, or the shapes of the most revolting animals—we take pleasure in viewing highly realistic images of them.” 

In this passage, Aristotle notes artistic representation has a transformative power. A highly realistic image of a horrible thing alchemizes into a pleasurable experience through its very realism. The poet John Keats said something similar a good 2,000-odd years later: “The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables [sic] evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout.”

“Tragedy is a representation of an action of a superior kind—grand, and complete in itself—presented in embellished language, in distinct forms in different parts, performed by actors rather than told by a narrator, effecting, through pity and fear, the purification of such emotions.” 

To Aristotle, tragedy doesn’t merely transform painful experience, but ritualistically purifies it. The representation of terrible events thus has a social function—helping people to release feelings that might otherwise prove poisonous. This catharsis, in Aristotle’s view, comes from careful structural choices: An audience must be led in a specific way for these emotions to be purified rather than merely aroused.

“The most important element is the construction of the plot. Tragedy is a representation not of persons but of action and life, and happiness and unhappiness consist in action. The point is action, not character: it is their moral status that gives people the character they have, but it is their actions that make them happy or unhappy.” 

In this formulation, a tragic hero’s beliefs and character are relevant only so far as they’re expressed in action. Aristotle goes on to add it’s perfectly possible to write a tragedy without any clear moral element at all—and novice poets with a good handle on style and characterization often can’t plot to save their lives (so to speak). While tragic heroes have morality, the effects of tragedy consist only in what they do with it.

“Beauty consists in scale as well as order, which is why there could not be a beautiful organism that was either miniscule or gigantic. In the first case, a glimpse that is so brief as to be close to vanishing-point cannot be distinct. In the second case–say, of an animal a thousand miles long—the impossibility of taking all in at a single glance means that unity and wholeness is lost to the viewer.” 

This examination of beauty demands that it be accessible. If beauty has to be comprehensible by the human mind, perhaps human perception is a defining quality of beauty: if there’s no one there to see a creature, is it beautiful? Aristotle also suggests an analogy here between natural and artistic beauty. Both, it seems, have a measured and ideal development.

“A story that is built around a single person is not, as some people think, thereby unified. An infinity of things happen to a single individual, not all of which constitute a unity; likewise, a single person performs many actions which do not add up to make a single action. So all those poets who compose a Heracleid or a Thesiad have clearly got things wrong, assuming that just because Heracles was one person his story too is sure to have a unity.” 

Aristotle’s tone possesses annoyance here. Unity, in his view, is not determined by subject but by theme. A story is unified if its episodes point toward a singular idea. While sprawling, episodic epic doesn’t have to share tragedy’s unity of time, it does need to select its episodes according to this principle of singular theme.

“[T]he poet’s job is not relating what actually happened, but rather the kind of thing that would happen—that is to say, what is possible in terms of probability and necessity. […] For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history; poetry utters universal truths, history particular statements.” 

Aristotle shapes and formulates centuries of poetic thought. The consistently and universally True was considered the purview of art until the fragmentation of postmodernism began to gnaw at the notion of truth itself. Aristotle puts it very simply: Looking at what’s universally true is a matter of “probability and necessity”—terms containing plenty of human chaos and strangeness.

“Tragedy is an imitation not just of a complete action, but of events that evoke pity and fear. These effects occur above all when things come about unexpectedly but at the same time consequentially. This will produce greater astonishment than if they come about spontaneously or by chance—for even chance events are found more astonishing when they seemed to have happened for a purpose. Think of the time in Argos when Mitys’ murderer was killed by Mitys’ statue falling onto him as he was looking up at it! Such things are not thought to occur randomly. So inevitably, stories of this kind will be better.” 

Representing universal truth isn’t a matter of factual reporting—that’s just plain old history; rather, it’s an act of shaping. Here, Aristotle notes that just as all the parts of the beautiful creature he imagined earlier should be visible at once, all the parts of a story should seem connected to each other to be meaningful rather than random. In meta-example, even a story about randomness will be better told if it holds together in a meaningful way.

“Stories can be classified as simple or complex, since the actions of which they are the representations are similarly classified in the first instance. I call an action simple if it is, in the sense defined, continuous and unitary, and in which the change of fortune takes place without reversal or discovery; I call it complex if the change of fortune involves a reversal or a discovery or both.” 

Aristotle’s careful classification of story types feels almost taxonomical. There’s a hint of the zoologist in this important passage, where he defines the simple versus the complex plot. Reversal and discovery will go on to be two of the most critical aspects of tragedy, in his view; Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex provides a classical example of a discovery that turns the world upside down.

“Actually seeing a play performed may evoke fear and pity, but so too can the plot itself—this is more fundamental and the mark of a better poet. The story should be put together in such a way that even without seeing the play a person hearing the series of events should feel dread and pity.” 

In Aristotle’s formulation, plot is so central to tragedy it should be able to produce necessary effects all on its own. Aristotle is careful to distinguish between theatrical effects and poetry. Plays, he believes, should stand on their own as literary works, before music and scenery and actors are added. However, at the end of the section on epic he approvingly returns to the power of music and acting in a tragedy. But these are heighteners of the tragic rather than the substance.

“Since tragedy is a representation of people who are better than we are, poets should copy good portrait-painters, who portray a person’s features and offer a good likeness but nonetheless make him look handsomer than he is. In the same way, a poet exhibiting people who are irascible and indolent should show them as they are, and yet portray them as good men—in the way that Homer made Achilles both a good man and a paradigm of stubbornness.” 

Here, Aristotle draws again on a favorite analogy: poetry’s kinship to painting. These representative arts both mimic reality not by perfectly imitating it, but by heightening it for effect. The world of the tragedy and the world of the portrait both strive for an intensified version of reality—and in that intensification, they reach for a broader truth than flat fact.

“As far as possible, the poet should act the story as he writes it. People of the same temperament are more persuasive if they actually feel the emotions they enact: someone actually in distress best acts out distress, someone really angry best acts out rage. This is why, in order to write tragic poetry, you must be either a genius who can adapt himself to anything, or a madman who lets himself get carried away.” 

Aristotle advises writers they need not merely think their way through their plots, but to inhabit them. To him, storytelling isn’t a matter of bloodless construction, but of feeling. Just as a tragedy should produce pity and fear, it should be born of pity and fear. Fully inhabiting an imaginative experience isn’t just a reality check for the writer, but a way to reproduce reality.

“You must call to mind what I have said several times: one should never build a tragedy with an epic structure, that is to say, one containing more than one story. Suppose one were to make the entire story of the Iliad into one play! Epic is long enough for every episode to appear on an appropriate scale, but in a drama the result is very disappointing. […] There is even a play of Agathon’s which was a flop simply because of this.” 

The dramatic unities Aristotle proposes aren’t merely to do with some rarified ideal, but with actual theatrical effect. Here, the reader sees Aristotle has derived his principles from observation. Poor Agathon’s “flop” demonstrates the folly of trying to make an epic into a tragedy. 

“In reversals and in simple plots poets like to astonish us, in order to produce a desired effect that is both tragic and humane. This happens when someone who is both clever and wicked (like Sisyphus) is taken in, or when someone who is brave but unjust is worsted. This is not improbable, since, as Agathon remarks, it is probable that many improbable things should happen.” 

Aristotle’s firm conviction in the importance of believability doesn’t make him a dry realist. The world, he observes, is certainly a place of cause and effect, but also a place of outlandish and improbable events. Representing reality doesn’t mean representing only likely events but justified ones. Even the strangest event can become believable if it fits into its own story.

“Sometimes there is no current word for one term of the analogy, and yet the analogy can be used. A sower scatters seed-corn, the sun scatters rays of fire: the first is called ‘sowing,’ the second has no name. Yet because the relation of the sun to its rays is the same as that of the sower to his seed-corn, the poet can speak of the sun ‘sowing his divine fire.’” 

In a long examination of the structure of language building from individual phonemes to complex metaphor, Aristotle suggests language is a matter of relations. Sounds become meaningful in relationship to each other. So, too, do concepts. Here, he suggests part of the work of language is to push past that which has no language by means of comparison and metaphor. Indeed, later he’ll argue that brilliant metaphor—the capacity to find similarities between different things—is the mark of the best poets.

“The best style is one that is clear without being vulgar.” 

Aristotle’s argument in favor of clear-but-artful language in tragedy again reflects his sense that the world of poetry plays by slightly different rules than the world of reality. He agrees with contemporary critics that too much elevated, elegant language makes a tragedy sound ridiculous and clarity is paramount. But he’s also careful to note that a tragedy’s language should be slightly marked out from everyday speech, just as its characters are marked as a little better than regular humans.

“What of representation in verse that takes the form of narrative? The story should, as in tragedy, be constructed dramatically, that is, based on a single action that is whole and entire and that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Only thus can epic, like a living organism, produce its own proper pleasure.” 

Two metaphors quietly shape much of the argument in Poetics: One is of the artwork as a living thing while the other is the artwork as another kind of artwork. Here, the idea of the “living organism” goes hand-in-hand with the pleasure a work of art can produce—a pleasure that, in this phrasing, the artwork itself seems to partake. Aristotle’s view of art balances the reasoned with the spontaneous and the organic.

“In tragedy it is not possible to represent several parts of the story occurring simultaneously, but only the one part on stage performed by the actors. But in epic the narrative form makes it possible to include many simultaneous incidents that, if germane to the issue, add weight to the poem.”

The modern-day reader may at once recognize Aristotle’s classifications as faithful, acute descriptions of ancient Greek art, and note those classifications have been broken down past recognition in contemporary art. But the DNA of these two modes of storytelling is still alive. The epic, with its capacity to be in several places at once, is a clear ancestor of the novel.

“Among all his other admirable qualities, Homer deserves praise because he is the only epic poet who knows what he should do in his own person. The poet should say as little as possible in his own voice; for that is not what makes him a mimic. Other poets are always coming forward in person, and engage in representation only rarely and briefly; whereas Homer, after a brief preamble, brings on stage a man or woman or other personage—every one a character and none of them mere dummies.” 

References to Homer pop up throughout Poetics and here, Aristotle devotes a whole section to praise. He’s interested in Homer as one who almost channels another world, becoming a brilliant “mimic” by stepping out of the way of his characters. This idea of the writer as a sort of spirit-medium persists to this day; this praise of the selfless Homer is akin to recent praise of the chameleonic Shakespeare.

“Astonishment gives pleasure: evidence of this is the fact that we all exaggerate when recounting events, hoping to please our audience.” 

Aristotle draws conclusions from life. To him, artistic representation isn’t just something happening in the theater. And indeed, this down-to-earth example remains as recognizable today as it was in 335 BCE.

“The criterion of correctness is not the same in poetry as in ethics, and not the same in poetry as in any other art. […] If a poem contains impossibilities, that is a fault. However, the fault may be forgiven if they serve the purpose of the art, as specified earlier, that is to say, if they make this or some other part of the poem more impressive.” 

To Aristotle, poetic truth is not the same as factual truth. The organic wholeness of a work of art is paramount and can justify the introduction of an impossible moment. In this reading, the attempt to communicate universal truth involves overriding mere fact.

“The needs of poetry make what is plausible though impossible preferable to what is possible but implausible.” 

In this formulation, plausibility is the organic, internal truth of a piece of art—a truth allowing for idealization or representing things the way they should be rather than the way they are. A perfectly reasonable event just might not fit into a work of poetry. This is another means of distinguishing between poetic and historical truth: History is always factual, but indiscriminate. Poetry is selective, ordered, and invented.