Poetics

Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving systematic treatment of literary theory, a set of lecture notes examining epic and especially tragedy as crafted structures with identifiable parts and effects rather than as divinely inspired mysteries. Against Plato, who had banished poets from his ideal city for peddling false and morally dangerous imitations, Aristotle argues that imitation (mimesis) is natural to human beings and a source of legitimate pleasure and understanding, since we learn by recognizing likenesses even in painful subjects. He defines tragedy as an imitation of a serious, complete action of a certain magnitude, accomplished through pity and fear, achieving through these emotions a katharsis, a term whose exact meaning (purgation, clarification, or emotional release) has been debated ever since but which clearly describes tragedy's characteristic effect on an audience.

Of the six elements he identifies in tragedy, plot (mythos) is by far the most important, more important even than character, because Aristotle holds that tragedy is an imitation of action and life, not of persons. He praises plots built around peripeteia, a reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis, a recognition, ideally occurring together as in Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus, which he treats throughout as his central example of technical mastery. The best tragic hero, he argues, is neither a purely good man brought low, which merely shocks, nor a villain punished, which satisfies no pity, but a man of reputation and prosperity who falls through hamartia, an error or flaw rather than depravity, so that an audience can feel both pity for undeserved suffering and fear that the same could happen to them.

The text as it survives covers only tragedy and epic in detail; a promised second book on comedy is lost. Despite this incompleteness and the note-like compression of its prose, the Poetics became, after its rediscovery in the Renaissance, the single most influential work of literary criticism in the Western tradition, supplying the vocabulary, plot, character, catharsis, unity of action, that critics and playwrights used for centuries to judge and construct drama, well past the point where its more rigid interpreters had ossified its observations into fixed rules.