WorkAvicenna

Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle

Working from only part of Aristotle's book, Avicenna argues that poetry persuades through images, and that people yield to images sooner than to proof.

by Avicenna53 passages held

Arabic, the original language

Original title: Fann al-Shiʿr
Original language: Arabic

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Overview

Only part of Aristotle's Poetics reached Avicenna, in an Arabic version made from a Syriac one, and he says so in his last lines: what he has written summarises the portion found in his part of the world, and a good part is missing. Fann al-Shiʿr (The Art of Poetry) is the ninth and last book of the logic of al-Shifāʾ (The Healing), since the Arabic tradition counted the Poetics, with the Rhetoric, among Aristotle's logical works, and the argument follows from that placement. Poetry, for Avicenna, is speech that acts on the imagination: it does not try to win assent to a claim, as a proof does, but moves the soul to act or to feel. People, he observes, give way to imagination more readily than to proof, and many dislike proofs and turn away when they hear them. Where Aristotle analysed Greek drama, Avicenna sets it beside Arabic verse. In his pages tragedy and comedy stay Greek words written in Arabic letters, ṭrāghūdhiyā and qūmūdhiyā. The Greeks, he writes, mostly imitated actions; the Arabs composed poems for two ends, to stir the listener toward some act or feeling, or simply for the wonder of a fine comparison. He closes by saying he might yet write an account of poetry in general and of poetry as his own age practised it. In the next century Averroes wrote his own commentary on the same Arabic text, and it was Averroes's version, not this one, that reached Latin Europe.

Key concepts

What is imaginative speech, or takhyīl?

It is speech that makes the soul picture something and react to the picture, drawn or repelled, without first being convinced that anything is true. A proof works by assent, a poem by imagination. Avicenna notes that an image can move the soul even when it is false, which is why poetry works on people that arguments never reach.

Why is a book on poetry part of logic?

Because the Arabic tradition sorted the arts of speech by the effect they have on a listener's mind, and placed Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics among his logical works. Proof produces certainty, rhetoric produces persuasion, poetry produces an imagined response. Logic studies all the ways speech moves a mind, so poetry closes the nine logical books of The Healing.

What is imitation, muḥākāt, in a poem?

It is presenting one thing through another. Avicenna names three ways: comparing a thing to something else, speaking of it by substitution, as metaphor does, or combining the two. Imitation, he says, comes naturally to human beings, and they enjoy it, as they enjoy a painted likeness of something they have seen. In his account, imitation is what makes speech poetic at all.

What does metre add to a poem?

Metre gives speech a rhythmic number: lines of equal measure that the ear can count. Avicenna requires it in a poem, and among the Arabs rhyme as well, but he denies that it is enough. Verse without imagery is not poetry, and philosophers who set their doctrines in metre wrote measured speech, not poems.

Themes of the book

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

Speech That Moves the Imagination

Why do people act on a vivid comparison when an argument leaves them cold? Avicenna's answer gives poetry a place among the arts of reasoning and a power that proof lacks.

Avicenna defines a poem as imaginative speech in measured, equal lines, rhymed among the Arabs. What makes it poetry is the image, not the metre: philosophers who wrote in verse, Socrates among them, did not write poems. A poem does not ask for assent. It presents a thing through a comparison, a metaphor or both, and the soul responds with desire or aversion whether the image is true or false. Since people yield to imagination sooner than to proof, a true description that moves the soul has the greater force.

poetry
poetic imitation
imitation
imagination
poetic imagination
emotion
rhetoric
metaphor
language
aesthetics
meter
poetic form

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Greek Drama, Arabic Verse

What can a poet of praise and love learn from a theatre he knows only from a book? Avicenna reads Aristotle on tragedy with Arabic poetry in his ear and keeps asking where the two meet.

Tragedy and comedy stay Greek words in Arabic letters, and Avicenna explains them from the text that reached him: a tragedy is sung and danced by a group, with an opening that stands where the love prelude stands in an Arabic ode, and its actions must be shown while its characters' habits need not be. The Greeks mostly imitated actions; the Arabs composed poems to move a listener toward some act or feeling, or for the wonder of a fine comparison. He ends hoping to treat poetry as his own age practised it.

tragedy
plot
comedy
genre
literary history
performance
music
pity and fear

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Within this work

passages held: 53
distinct concepts: 110
by passages held, corpus-wide: #647

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “poetry” and “rhetoric”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 56 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
poetry	rhetoric	9
plot	tragedy	7
imagination	poetry	6
imagination	rhetoric	4
aesthetics	poetic imitation	3
emotion	poetry	3
plot	poetic imitation	3
plot	poetry	3
poetic imitation	tragedy	3
aesthetics	poetry	2
aesthetics	tragedy	2
emotion	rhetoric	2
emotion	tragedy	2
aesthetics	emotion	1
aesthetics	imagination	1
aesthetics	plot	1
aesthetics	rhetoric	1
emotion	imagination	1
emotion	plot	1
emotion	poetic imitation	1
poetic imitation	poetry	1
poetry	tragedy	1
rhetoric	tragedy	1

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.

A Compendium on the Soul (Kitāb fī al-nafs ʿalā sunnat al-ikhtiṣār)
The earliest of his books, written for the Sāmānid court at Bukhara before any of the summaries of philosophy that made his name.
EN
A Treatise on Love (Risāla fī māhiyyat al-ʿishq)
Written at the request of a jurist, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Maʿṣūmī, and set out in seven short sections.
AR
al-Najāt
Between the vast al-Shifāʾ and the allusive Ishārāt in both length and manner, and the usual way into his logic.
AR
al-Taʿlīqāt
A classroom companion to his metaphysics: short notes on its key terms, read today beside al-Shifāʾ.
AR
Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle (Fann al-Shiʿr) you are here AR
Kitāb al-Nafs
The fullest of his many accounts of the soul, written as natural science, and the one Latin Europe read.
AR
Kitāb al-Siyāsa
The household branch of practical philosophy, set out for a man, his family and his servants, in a short Arabic treatise.
AR
Remarks and Admonitions (al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt)
Shorter than al-Najāt and far shorter than al-Shifāʾ, though written after both, as a statement of his mature philosophy.
AR
Risāla fī maʿrifat al-nafs al-nāṭiqa wa-aḥwālihā
A short epistle in three chapters and an epilogue, one of several treatises on the soul that circulate under his name.
AR
The Healing, Logic: Isagoge (al-Madkhal)
The first of the nine books of logic in al-Shifāʾ, and the place where the prologue to the whole encyclopedia stands.
AR
The Metaphysics of The Healing (al-Ilāhiyyāt)
His fullest metaphysics, known to Latin readers as the Liber de philosophia prima; it closes al-Shifāʾ after the logic, the physics and the mathematics.
AR

— or open another of their works