When was poetics published

Like many important documents in the history of philosophy and literary theory, Aristotle's Poetics , composed around BCE, was most likely preserved in the form of students' lecture notes. This brief text, through its various interpretations and applications from the Renaissance onward, has had a profound impact on Western aesthetic philosophy and artistic production.

The Poetics is in part Aristotle's response to his teacher, Plato, who argues in The Republic that poetry is representation of mere appearances and is thus misleading and morally suspect. Aristotle's approach to the phenomenon of poetry is quite different from Plato's.

Fascinated by the intellectual challenge of forming categories and organizing them into coherent systems, Aristotle approaches literary texts as a natural scientist, carefully accounting for the features of each "species" of text. Rather than concluding that poets should be banished from the perfect society, as does Plato, Aristotle attempts to describe the social function, and the ethical utility, of art.

One of the most difficult concepts introduced in the Poetics is catharsis , a word which has come into everyday language even though scholars are still debating its actual meaning in Aristotle's text.

Catharsis is most often defined as the "purging" of the emotions of pity and fear that occurs when we watch a tragedy. What is actually involved in this purging is not clear. Socrates: You know that logos signifies everything and is always circling and revolving around everything, and is double, true and false. Hermogenes: Yes, of course. Socrates: Isn't the case that the true part of it is smooth, divine, and dwells above among the gods; but the false dwells below among the many of human beings and is rough and tragic; for most muthoi and falsehoods are there, about the tragic life.

Hermogeries: Yes, of course. Because of the weight of this tradition and the obvious concern of the book with poetry and especially tragedy, we have retained this translation.

However it should be kept in mind that poiein is a very common verb in Greek, and that in principle the art dealing with it could have as much to do with making or action as with poetry in the narrower sense. Where an ambiguity of meaning seems possibly intentional, the Greek verb will be placed in brackets after the translation. Virtually every occurrence in the translation of any form of the verb "to make" is a rendering of the Greek poiein , and all appearances of English words cognate with "poet" are translations of words cognate with poiein.

At a Aristotle indicates that imitation comes to be not only by art but also by habit. In Plato it is used for "form" or "idea. Eidos is regularly translated as "kind.

Its cognate and almost synonym, idea , will be translated as "form. See footnote 1 above. In its adjectival form, kalon , it means both beautiful and noble. We will translate it by both; sometimes together, sometimes, where the context demands, we will choose one or the other. Wherever another word is translated by "noble," the Greek term will follow the translation in brackets; "beautiful" will always translate kalon. The opposite of kalon , aischron , means both shameful and ugly; it will be translated similarly either by the conjunction of the two terms or as context demands by one or the other.

Aristotle discusses the difference between the two terms in The Parts of Animals , which might be translated more accurately as The Proper Parts of Animals. Of the approximately occurrences of the term in Aristotle, some 80 are in On Poetics. Sophron wrote male and female mimes.

It also means law or custom. It is an important term in On Poetics and will be translated throughout by "of stature. It will be translated throughout by "inferior. Aristotle seems to be bringing out the curious fact that, if one disregards exits and entrances, despite being an "imitation of action," tragedy contains no action in the literal sense.

The definition thus refers to the plot as an action. See, for example, Metaphysics 9. It can also mean "to exert oneself over" or "to have something done in return to one"; etymologically it might be construed as "antipoetize. The Megarians are ridiculed in comedy, since they also claim that comedy was first discovered by them, inasmuch as the one who started comedy was Susarion the Megarian.

They are disparaged as vulgar and tasteless and for using purple in the parodos. Aristophanes, at any rate, in mocking them, says somewhere, 'No stolen joke from Megara. All of the wise, with the exception of Parmenides, occur about this, Protagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, and of the poets, those who are tip-top in each kind of poetry, Epicharmus of comedy, and Homer, of tragedy. On his arrival in Syracuse, he abstained from philosophizing openly on account of the tyranny of Hiero, but he put into meter the thoughts of the Pythagoreans, making known their secret doctrines playfully.

This passage is the only evidence we have that it is of Doric origin. See Appendix 1f. I suggest that Aristotle is right in saying that the powers which first of all bring this human image to sight for us are pity and fear. It is obvious that the authors in our examples are not just putting things in front of us to make us cry or shiver or gasp. The feelings they arouse are subordinated to another effect. Aristotle begins by saying that tragedy arouses pity and fear in such a way as to culminate in a cleansing of those passions, the famous catharsis.

The word is used by Aristotle only the once, in his preliminary definition of tragedy. I think this is because its role is taken over later in the Poetics by another, more positive, word, but the idea of catharsis is important in itself, and we should consider what it might mean. First of all, the tragic catharsis might be a purgation. Fear can obviously be an insidious thing that undermines life and poisons it with anxiety. It would be good to flush this feeling from our systems, bring it into the open, and clear the air.

This may explain the appeal of horror movies, that they redirect our fears toward something external, grotesque, and finally ridiculous, in order to puncture them. On the other hand, fear might have a secret allure, so that what we need to purge is the desire for the thrill that comes with fear. The horror movie also provides a safe way to indulge and satisfy the longing to feel afraid, and go home afterward satisfied; the desire is purged, temporarily, by being fed.

Our souls are so many-headed that opposite satisfactions may be felt at the same time, but I think these two really are opposite. In the first sense of purgation, the horror movie is a kind of medicine that does its work and leaves the soul healthier, while in the second sense it is a potentially addictive drug.

Either explanation may account for the popularity of these movies among teenagers, since fear is so much a fact of that time of life. For those of us who are older, the tear-jerker may have more appeal, offering a way to purge the regrets of our lives in a sentimental outpouring of pity. As with fear, this purgation too may be either medicinal or drug-like. This idea of purgation, in its various forms, is what we usually mean when we call something cathartic. People speak of watching football, or boxing, as a catharsis of violent urges, or call a shouting match with a friend a useful catharsis of buried resentment.

This is a practical purpose that drama may also serve, but it has no particular connection with beauty or truth; to be good in this purgative way, a drama has no need to be good in any other way.

But the English word catharsis does not contain everything that is in the Greek word. Let us look at other things it might mean. Catharsis in Greek can mean purification. While purging something means getting rid of it, purifying something means getting rid of the worse or baser parts of it. It is possible that tragedy purifies the feelings themselves of fear and pity. These arise in us in crude ways, attached to all sorts of objects.

Perhaps the poet educates our sensibilities, our powers to feel and be moved, by refining them and attaching them to less easily discernible objects.

The poetic imagination is limited only by its skill, and can turn any object into a focus for any feeling. Some people turn to poetry to find delicious and exquisite new ways to feel old feelings, and consider themselves to enter in that way into a purified state. Sophocles does make me fear and pity human knowledge when I watch the Oedipus Tyrannus , but this is not a refinement of those feelings but a discovery that they belong to a surprising object.

Sophocles is not training my feelings, but using them to show me something worthy of wonder. The word catharsis drops out of the Poetics because the word wonder, to rhaumaston , replaces it, first in chapter 9, where Aristotle argues that pity and fear arise most of all where wonder does, and finally in chapters 24 and 25, where he singles out wonder as the aim of the poetic art itself, into which the aim of tragedy in particular merges.

Ask yourself how you feel at the end of a tragedy. You have witnessed horrible things and felt painful feelings, but the mark of tragedy is that it brings you out the other side. The tragic pleasure is a paradox. At the end of the play the stage is often littered with bodies, and we feel cleansed by it all.

Are we like Iago, who has to see a beautiful life destroyed to feel better about himself Oth. V, i, ? We all feel a certain glee in the bringing low of the mighty, but this is in no way similar to the feeling of being washed in wonderment. The closest thing I know to the feeling at the end of a tragedy is the one that comes with the sudden, unexpected appearance of something beautiful. What is the effect on us of this recognition?

Aristotle is insistent that a tragedy must be whole and one, because only in that way can it be beautiful, while he also ascribes the superiority of tragedy over epic poetry to its greater unity and concentration ch. Tragedy is not just a dramatic form in which some works are beautiful and others not; tragedy is itself a species of beauty.

All tragedies are beautiful. We noticed earlier that it is action that characterizes the distinctively human realm, and it is reasonable that the depiction of an action might show us a human being in some definitive way, but what do pity and fear have to do with that showing? The answer is everything. First, let us consider what tragic pity consists in.

The word pity tends to have a bad name these days, and to imply an attitude of condescension that diminishes its object. This is not a matter of the meanings of words, or even of changing attitudes. It belongs to pity itself to be two-sided, since any feeling of empathy can be given a perverse twist by the recognition that it is not oneself but another with whom one is feeling a shared pain. One of the most empathetic characters in all literature is Edgar in King Lear.

Yet in the last scene of the play this same Edgar voices the stupidest words ever spoken in any tragedy, when he concludes that his father just got what he deserved when he lost his eyes, since he had once committed adultery V, iii, Having witnessed the play, we know that Gloucester lost his eyes because he chose to help Lear, when the kingdom had become so corrupt that his act of kindness appeared as a walking fire in a dark world I1I, iv, This suggests that holding on to proper pity leads to seeing straight, and that seems exactly right.

But what is proper pity? There is a way of missing the mark that is opposite to condescension, and that is the excess of pity called sentimentality. Sentimentality is inordinate feeling, feeling that goes beyond the source that gives rise to it.

Pity is one of the instruments by which a poet can show us what we are. Shakespeare is in control here, and the feeling he produces does not give way in embarrassment to moral judgment, nor does it make us wallow mindlessly in pity because it feels so good; the pity he arouses in us shows us what is precious in us, in the act of its being violated in another.

Since every boundary has two sides, the human image is delineated also from the outside, the side of the things that threaten it.

This is shown to us through the feeling of fear. As Aristotle says twice in the Rhetoric , what we pity in others, we fear for ourselves b 26, a In our mounting fear that Oedipus will come to know the truth about himself, we feel that something of our own is threatened. Tragic fear, exactly like tragic pity, and either preceding it or simultaneous with it, shows us what we are and are unwilling to lose.

Tragedy is about central and indispensable human attributes, disclosed to us by the pity that draws us toward them and the fear that makes us recoil from what threatens them. Because the suffering of the tragic figure displays the boundaries of what is human, every tragedy carries the sense of universality. Oedipus or Antigone or Lear or Othello is somehow every one of us, only more so.

But the mere mention of these names makes it obvious that they are not generalized characters, but altogether particular. And if we did not feel that they were genuine individuals, they would have no power to engage our emotions.

It is by their particularity that they make their marks on us, as though we had encountered them in the flesh. It is only through the particularity of our feelings that our bonds with them emerge. What we care for and cherish makes us pity them and fear for them, and thereby the reverse also happens: our feelings of pity and fear make us recognize what we care for and cherish.

When the tragic figure is destroyed it is a piece of ourselves that is lost. Yet we never feel desolation at the end of a tragedy, because what is lost is also, by the very same means, found. I am not trying to make a paradox, but to describe a marvel. It is not so strange that we learn the worth of something by losing it; what is astonishing is what the tragedians are able to achieve by making use of that common experience.

They lift it up into a state of wonder. Within our small group of exemplary poetic works, there are two that do not have the tragic form, and hence do not concentrate all their power into putting us in a state of wonder, but also depict the state of wonder among their characters and contain speeches that reflect on it.