WorkAristotle

The Art of Poetry

For two and a half centuries what Europe read was an Arabic commentary that took tragedy for the art of praise and comedy for the art of blame.

by Aristotle93 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Περὶ Ποιητικῆς
First published: 330 BCE(aged 54)
Original language: Ancient Greek

Report a rights issue

Overview

Half of it is gone. Ancient copies filled two papyrus rolls, and the surviving roll covers tragedy and epic; the second, on comedy, disappeared early enough that scholars argue over a late summary as their best evidence of what it said. What is left is a technical account rather than an appreciation, and it does not praise a single poem. Poetry is mimesis, and the kinds differ by their medium, by the sort of people they show, and by whether a poet narrates or lets characters act. Plot outranks character: a tragedy is an arrangement of incidents, and the strongest arrangements bring a reversal and a recognition together out of a mistake made by someone neither villainous nor blameless. What all this does to an audience Aristotle names in a single word, katharsis, and then declines to explain; readers have been arguing about the word for five hundred years. The book's own passage through history is stranger than its contents. A Greek manuscript older than 700 CE reached Arabic by way of Syriac, and Averroes read the whole thing as a moral treatise, tragedy being the art of praise and comedy the art of blame. In that shape, translated at Toledo in 1256 by Hermann the German, it was the only Aristotelian poetics medieval Europe possessed. Moerbeke's careful Latin version from the Greek, finished in 1278, went unread. Giorgio Valla printed a Latin translation in 1498 and the Aldine press the Greek in 1508, and Italian critics — Lodovico Castelvetro's editions of 1570 and 1576 among the most consequential — then spent a century converting a description of how tragedies work into rules about how they must be written.

Key concepts

What does Aristotle mean when he calls poetry mimesis?

Mimesis means that poetry represents human action through an artistic form. Aristotle therefore studies what a poem shows, the medium it uses, the kinds of people it presents, and whether it narrates or lets characters act. Poetry is not treated as private expression or decoration; its identity depends on how representation is made.

How does Aristotle classify poetry beyond its subject matter?

Aristotle classifies poetry by three features: its medium, the sort of people it represents, and its mode of presentation. A work may differ from another through the materials it uses, the characters it shows, or the way it conveys action. Classification therefore describes how a poem works, not merely what it depicts.

Why does Aristotle analyze poetry technically instead of praising particular poems?

Aristotle analyzes poetry as a practice with identifiable parts and effects, rather than offering admiration for individual poems. His account asks what makes tragedy tragedy and how its arrangements produce their result. That technical method turns criticism away from taste alone and toward the construction of works.

What does katharsis name in Aristotle’s account of tragedy?

Katharsis names what tragedy does to its audience, but Aristotle does not explain the word. It appears as the effect toward which tragic representation and arrangement lead, while its precise meaning remains open to dispute. The term therefore marks a central problem in the book rather than supplying a settled psychological formula.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Architecture of Tragedy

Why does a tragedy move an audience through the arrangement of incidents rather than the virtue of its characters? The answer determines whether poetry merely represents action or gives suffering a form that can be understood.

Aristotle treats poetry as mimesis, but he refuses to measure it by resemblance alone: poets differ by medium, by the people they show, and by whether they narrate or let characters act. Against the preference for character over action, he makes plot the organizing cause of tragedy. Its strongest form joins reversal to recognition through an error by someone neither villainous nor blameless; its effect, katharsis, remains unexplained. The missing second roll leaves comedy outside the surviving account.

aesthetics
narrative structure
language
mimesis
causality
unity
meaning
representation
narrative
human nature
poetics
tragedy
plot
diction
plot structure
epic poetry
recognition

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 93
distinct concepts: 158
by passages held, corpus-wide: #185

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: aesthetics with narrative structure.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 14 pairings. 92 shared passages in all. 86 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
aesthetics	narrative structure	17
aesthetics	mimesis	11
aesthetics	storytelling	10
narrative structure	storytelling	9
aesthetics	artistic integrity	7
communication	language	7
aesthetics	communication	6
aesthetics	composition	5
aesthetics	language	5
artistic integrity	narrative structure	5
composition	narrative structure	4
artistic integrity	composition	2
artistic integrity	storytelling	2
composition	language	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

-350 Organon and Categories (Κατηγορίαι)
The medieval schools came at these six through Porphyry's Isagoge. The rest of the corpus simply uses them: the Physics, the Metaphysics and the biological works take the syllogism and the ten kinds as given.
GRCEN
-330 Constitution of Athens (Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία)
Historians use it as a source rather than as a text to interpret, which is true of nothing else under Aristotle's name. It belongs beside the Politics, as the surviving piece of the survey that fed it.
GRCEN
-330 Politics: A Treatise on Government (Πολιτικά)
Not a finished book but lectures, with shorter pieces and marginal notes worked in — and the place where the Nicomachean Ethics was heading when it closed by saying that the study of character runs on into the study of constitutions.
GRCEN
-330 The Art of Poetry (Περὶ Ποιητικῆς) you are here GRCEN
Economics
Aristotle treats the same ground himself in the household economics of Politics I. These three books keep their place in his corpus on the strength of the name alone; scholarship removed them without settling on anyone else.
GRCEN
Eudemian Ethics
One of three ethical treatises transmitted under Aristotle's name, alongside the Nicomachean Ethics and the Magna Moralia — the last of the three being the one whose authenticity is disputed.
GRCEN
Metaphysics
Form, matter and cause are argued out in the Physics, not here, and the works on animals and the soul are built on the framework it lays down; what this book asks is what it takes for anything to be at all. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna, Averroes and Aquinas each built a commentary on it.
GRCEN
The "Art" of Rhetoric
The published title keeps the quotation marks around Art from Freese's 1926 Loeb edition. Its subject is public life — the assembly, the court, the funeral oration — but its form is the school's, like everything else of his that survives.
GRCEN
The Nicomachean Ethics (Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια)
The fullest of Aristotle's ethical treatises, and the one the tradition kept: it shares three books with the Eudemian Ethics, which covers the same ground. Its last page hands the subject over to the Politics.
GRCEN

— or open another of their works