Poetics

Nonfiction | Book | Adult

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Parts 1-4

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

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Important Quotes

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Themes

Catharsis

One of the most famous and influential ideas in Poetics is catharsis: the emotional release provoked by an artistic experience. While the term is now more generally used, Aristotle envisions it as specifically to do with tragedy, and even more specifically to do with the release of two emotions: pity and fear. Pity, he says, comes from sympathy for a character’s sufferings; fear comes from the uneasy sense that what happened to a character could as well happen to the reader. Tragedy provides a safe outlet for these feelings, and even a “purification of such emotions”—a transformative release (23).

Catharsis, then, is related to Aristotle’s larger point about mimetic representation. Experiencing a tragedy is about recognizing a correspondence between what happens on stage, what happens in the world, and what happens within us—an emotional movement that’s perhaps reflected in the form that Aristotle describes, in which a terrible recognition is an indispensable part of the tragic form. Catharsis itself is a mirroring.

Poetry as a Creature

Much of Poetics treats poetry as a living entity. Discussing the role of the plausible and the possible, Aristotle refers to how they fit into “[t]he needs of poetry,” as if poetry had its own desires and hungers (53). When he discusses the proper scale of a tragedy, he does so in terms of the natural world:

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 (26).

Perhaps it makes sense, then, that Aristotle approaches his subject with a biologist’s eye, looking for slight distinctions between members of the genus “Poetry” and dissecting its specimens.

If poetry is alive, however, it also has its own designs and part of the work of the poet (after they’ve seen to the necessary conditions for a little tragedy or epic to grow) is to step out of poetry’s way. Aristotle reserves his highest praise for Homer, whose genius seems to be not in showing off his own linguistic skill, not “coming forward in person,” but in allowing his art to speak for itself (49).

Unity

The surviving parts of Poetics deal with two forms of poetry: tragedy and epic. As Aristotle explains, these modes thematically can have plenty in common, but their shapes are fundamentally different—and different in ways that lesser writers don’t always recognize. A tragedy is marked by concentrated effect: It needs to take place over a short, digestible span of time (both in performance and within the play’s time-world), to focus on a single plot, and (most of all) to evoke pity and fear. A tragedy is also dramatized, with actors and scenery. An epic, meanwhile, is a sprawling, episodic beast, told by a single narrator.

But in spite of their very different shapes, both these forms need a quality Aristotle calls “unity.” Unity doesn’t just mean there’s a central character or event. As Aristotle puts it:

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 (27).

Similarly, he notes, Homer was right not to include every episode of the Trojan war in the Iliad, but to select the ones relevant to the Iliad’s needs.

Aristotelian unity might be compared to a spinal cord: a central, structuring idea, a basic narrative, which grows at the heart of every work of art and extends its tendrils into all its parts. This spine supports and justifies all that grows off it—and anything that doesn’t connect to that spine can be discarded.