Poetics

“What is poetry, how many kinds of it are there, and what are their specific effects? That is our topic, and we will inquire how stories are to be put together to make a good poetical work, and what is the number and nature of poetry’s component parts, and raise other questions arising in the same area of inquiry. We shall make our start, as is natural, from first principles.” 

In the introduction of Poetics, Aristotle lays out his intentions with scholarly precision. This will be a meticulous examination of poetry, seeking to categorize its types as a lepidopterist might categorize butterflies. Note that “poetry” here doesn’t just mean verse as it’s known today, but plays and epics, too.

“Homer represents people better than us and Cleophon people similar to us, while people worse than us figure in the works of Hegemon of Thasos, the inventor of parodies, and Nicochares who wrote the Deiliad. […] The very same difference makes the distinction between tragedy and comedy: the latter aims to represent people as worse, and the former as better, than people nowadays are.” 

Aristotle’s distinction between types of objects in poetry creates his genre divisions. Here, tragedy, which represents its characters as noble and grand, takes a higher rank than comedy, which is interested in human folly and baseness, in the proverbial pecking order. This implied hierarchy persists in popular thought to this day.

“Two things, both of them natural, seem likely to have been the causes of the origin of poetry. Representation comes naturally to human beings from childhood, and so does the universal pleasure in representations. Indeed, this marks off humans from other animals: man is prone to representation beyond all others, and learns his earliest lessons through representation.” 

In Aristotle’s view, representative art is a natural part of the human experience. Indeed, it’s even a defining trait—the thing separating humans from other animals. Aristotle frames representation as an innate and educational part of life, but also as a pleasurable one: Art isn’t just a tool with which to learn, but a delight.