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Unit 1: Aristotle: The Poetics—Introduction to the Author and the Text

But further, the work has a permanent value, quite apart from historical considerations. Aristotle’s Notes
fundamental assumptions, and the generalizations upon which he mainly insists, are as true of
any modern literature as they are of his own. That a work of art, for instance,—a drama, or the
like—may be compared to a living organism, every part of whose structure is essential for the
function of the whole, is a conception having validity for all ages. And the same may also be said
of his contention that poetry has its own standard of correctness or fitness, and is to be judged
primarily by its own laws.
The Poetics is further valuable for its method and perspective. Simply and directly it lays emphasis
upon what is of first importance : upon the vital structure of a poem rather than the metre ; upon
the end and aim of tragedy, in its effect, upon emotions rather than on the history of the Chorus.
Profound thoughts are expressed in language suited to a scientific inquiry. Starting with the
Platonic assumption that a literary form, an oration, for example, or a tragedy, has the nature of
a living organism, Aristotle advances to the position, that each distinct kind of literature must
have a definite and characteristic activity or function, and that this specific function must be
equivalent to the effect which the form produces upon a competent observer; that is, form and
function being, as it were, interchangeable terms, the organism is what it does to the person who
is capable of judging what it does or ought to do. Then further, beginning again with the general
literary estimates that had become more or less crystallized during the interval between the age of
the Attic drama and his own time, and that enabled him to assign tentative values to one play and
another, the great critic found a way to select, out of a large extent, literature, a small number of
tragedies which must necessarily conform more nearly than the rest to ideal type. As in his
Politics, which is based upon researches among a great number of municipal constitutions, yet
with emphasis upon a few, so in the Poetics his conclusions regarding tragedy depend upon a
collection of instances as exhaustive as he could make it without loss of perspective; that is. his
observation was inclusive so that he might not pass over what since the days of Bacon we have
been accustomed to think of as, ‘crucial instances’. By a penetrating security of these crucial
instances in tragedy, he still more narrowly defined what ought to be the proper effect of this kind
of literature upon the ideal spectator, namely, the effect which he terms the catharsis of pity and
fear, the purgation of the two disturbing emotions. Then, reasoning from function back to form,
and from form again to function, he would test each select tragedy, and every part of it, by the
way in which the part and the whole conduced to this emotional relief. In this manner, he arrived
at the conception of an ideal structure for tragedy, a pattern which, though never fully realised in
any existing Greek drama, must yet constitute the standard for all of its kind.
Finally, the Poetics, if it be sympathetically studied, may be thought to have a special value at the
present time, when a school has arisen, led by Professor Croce, whose notion seems to be that
there really are no types in art, and hence no standards of interpretation and criticism, save the
aim of the individual writer or painter. In his essay Of Education Milton alludes to some ‘antidote’
in one part of literature to an evil tendency in another. Whenever the Poetics of Aristotle receives
the attention it demands, it serves as an antidote to anarchy in criticism.

1.4 Plato's Objection to Poetry

Admirers of Plato are usually lovers of literary art. It is so because Plato wrote dramatic dialogues
rather than didactic volumes and did so with rare literary skill. You would expect such a philosopher
to place a high value on literary art, but Plato actually attacked it, along with other forms of what
he called mimesis. According to Plato's theory of mimesis (imitation) the arts deal with illusion
and they are imitation of an imitation. Thus, they are twice removed from reality. As a moralist,
Plato disapproves of poetry because it is immoral, as a philosopher he disapproves of it because it
is based in falsehood. He is of the view that philosophy is better than poetry because philosopher
deals with idea / truth, whereas poet deals with what appears to him / illusion. He believed that
truth of philosophy was more important than the pleasure of poetry. He argued that most of it
should be banned from the ideal society that he described in the Republic.

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