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Aristotle's Approach to Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

B. R. Rees
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Extract

These are the opening words of Aristotle's Poetics, generally recognized as the most influential work in the history of Western European drama and poetic theory since the Renaissance. The initial statement of the scope of the inquiry is a formidable one; but a reader coming to it for the first time might well be forgiven for concluding that it promises far more than it achieves. Is it possible, he might ask, that all this is contained in a slim volume occupying no more than 47 pages in the Oxford Classical Text and 45 in the Penguin translation? Reading further, he might become even more disillusioned: what he discovers is that, after a very brief and perfunctory introduction on poetry as a form of mimesis or artistic representation, Aristotle limits himself to a discussion of tragedy, a cursory treatment of epic, and a few passing references to comedy, and that, even in the case of tragedy, by far the major part of the argument is devoted to an examination of plot. Can this really be the work which excited scholars in the Renaissance, inspired Milton to write Samson Agonistes, an Aristotelian drama if there ever was one, provided the structural pattern and dramatic conventions for the plays of Racine and Corneille, gave Fielding the principles on which he based his Tom Jones, influenced Goethe and Lessing and, through Lessing, Coleridge, and has won the attention and admiration of critics writing in English from James Harris at the end of the eighteenth century to Richard MacKeon in the second half of the twentieth? And, if so, why?

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , April 1981 , pp. 23 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1981

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References

1. See Rees, B. R., Aristotle's Theory and Milton's Practice: Samson Agonistes (University of Birmingham, 1972)Google Scholar.

2. See Olson, E. (ed.), Aristotle's Poetics and English Literature (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar.

3. Russell, D. A. and Winterbottom, M., Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1972), p. 85Google Scholar.

4. Lloyd, G. E. R., Aristotle: the Growth and Structure of his Thought (Cambridge, 1968), p. 311Google Scholar. I wish to record my great debt to this most lucid and comprehensive account of Aristotle's work.

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8. For an imaginative reconstruction of this treatment see Cooper, Lane, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (New York, 1922)Google Scholar.

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12. Ibid. p. 60.

13. Grene, , op. cit., pp. 22–3Google Scholar, quoting De Anima, 412b 6–8. For the meaning of arche see Peck, A. L. (ed.), Ar. Hist. An., Loeb ed. vol. i. pp. lxvii–lxviiiGoogle Scholar.

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22. See Rees, B. R., ‘Pathos in the Poetics of Aristotle’, G & R 19 (1972), 1–11Google Scholar.

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24. As the present writer did in ‘Plot, Character and Thought’, Hommages à Claire Préaux (Brussels, 1975), pp. 188–96Google Scholar.

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37. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

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