Among scholarly debates on the Poetics, the three most prominent concern the meanings of catharsis and hamartia and the question of why Aristotle appears to contradict himself between chapters 13 and 14. Īlthough the text is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, 'almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions'. The surviving book of Poetics is primarily concerned with drama the analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out.Difference of goodness in the characters.

Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter, and melody.The genres all share the function of mimesis, or imitation of life, but differ in three ways that Aristotle describes: In this text Aristotle offers an account of ποιητική, which refers to poetry and more literally 'the poetic art,' deriving from the term for 'poet author maker,' ποιητής.Īristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama ( comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and epic. 335 BC ) is the earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. For other uses, see Poetics (disambiguation).Īristotle's Poetics ( Greek: Περὶ ποιητικῆς Peri poietikês Latin: De Poetica c. For the theory of literary forms and discourse, see Poetics. This article is about the treatise by Aristotle.

Aristotle book poetics