Poetics

by Aristotle

Overview

Essential reading for all students of Greek theatre and literature, and equally stimulating for anyone interested in literature

In the Poetics, his near-contemporary account of classical Greek tragedy, Aristotle examine the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the Poetics introduced into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis ('imitation'), hamartia ('error') and katharsis, which have informed serious thinking about drama ever since. Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, while centring on chaaracerts of heroic stature, idealised yet true to life. One of the most perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since.

Malcolm Heath's lucid translation makes the Poetics fully accessible to the modern reader. In this edition it is accompanied by an extended introduction, which discusses the key concepts in detail, and includes suggestions for further reading. 

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625399564
Publisher:	Acheron Press
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

David Gorman is Associate Professor at Northern Illinois University. His articles on the history and theory of literary study have appeared in Modern Literature Quarterly, Poetics Today, and Educational Philosophy and Theory. He also has strong interests in philosophy (especially the philosophy of language) and in classics (especially the history of the classical tradition).

Michelle Zerba is Maggie B. Martin Professor of Rhetoric and Classical Studies at Louisiana State University. Her research and teaching span the fields of classical literature, rhetoric, and philosophy; Renaissance studies; and political theory; and classical reception. She is the author of Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance and Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict Since Aristotle as well as many scholarly articles.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

About the poetic art itself and the forms of it, what specific capacity each has, and how one ought to put together stories if the making of them is going to hold together beautifully, and also how many and what sort of parts stories are made of, and likewise about as many other things as belong to the inquiry into poetic art, let us speak once we have first started, in accord with nature, from the things that come first.

Now epic poetry and the making of tragedy, and also comedy and dithyrambic poetry, as well as most flute-playing and lyre-playing, are all as a whole just exactly imitations, but they are different from one another in three ways, for they differ either by making their imitations in different things, by imitating different things, or by imitating differently and not in the same way. For just as some people who make images imitate many things by means of both colors and shapes (some through art and others through habituation), and others by means of the voice, so too with the arts mentioned, all of them make imitations in rhythm, speech, and harmony, and with these either separate or mixed. For example, both flute-playing and lyre-playing, and any other arts there happen to be that are of that sort in their capacity, such as the art of the Pan-pipes, use only harmony and rhythm, while the art of dancers uses rhythm itself apart from harmony (for they too, through the rhythms of their gestures, imitate states of character, feelings, and actions). But the art that uses bare words and the one that uses meters, and the latter either mixing meters with one another or using one particular kind, happen to be nameless up to now. For we have nothing to use as a name in common for the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues, even if someone were to make the imitation with [iambic] trimeters or elegiac [couplets] or anything else of that sort. Instead, people connect the poetic making with the meter and name “elegiac poets,” or others “epic poets,” calling them poets not as a result of the imitation but as a result of the meter as what is common to them, for even when they bring out something medical or about nature in meter, people are accustomed to speak of them in that way. But nothing is common to Homer and Empedocles except the meter, and hence, while it is just to call the former a poet, the latter is more a student of nature than a poet. By the same token, even if someone were to make an imitation by mixing all the meters, the very way Chaeremon made the Centaur as a patchwork mixture of all the meters, one would have to call him too a poet. As for these things, then, let them be distinguished in this way. And there are some arts that use all the things mentioned—I mean, for instance, rhythm and melody and meter—as do the making of both dithyrambs and nomes, and both tragedy and comedy.

Table of Contents

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Malcolm Heath

Introduction
1. Human culture, poetry and the Poetics
2. Imitation
3. Aristotle's history of poetry
4. The analysis of tragedy
5. Plot: the basics
6. Reversal and recognition
7. The best kinds of tragic plot
8. The pleasures of tragedy
9. The other parts of tragedy
10. Tragedy: miscellaneous aspects
11. Epic
12. Comedy
13. Further reading
14. Reference conventions
Notes to the Introduction
Synopsis of the Poetics

POETICS

Notes to the translation

Interviews

Designed for courses in undergraduate philosophy, as well as for the general reader interested in the major works of western civilization.

Editorial Reviews

I find the Introduction extremely convincing, lucid, learned, fair to past scholarship, and truly illuminating about the meaning of tragedy in general and about the very specific acceptions of hamartia, katharsis, ekplêxis, and thauma, in the context of an appropriate understanding of the Poetics. Another remarkable feature is the dexterity and ease with which it draws on all the relevant parts of the Aristotelian corpus to shed light on troublesome textual passages in the Poetics. Finally, the style of the Introduction is straightforward, free of unnecessary jargon, direct, and economical, the best interpretation of the Poetics I ever read.

- Sabetai Unguru, Tel Aviv University

“The translations of Joe Sachs are a great gift to Greekless amateurs like me. He uses simple, unambiguous words joined into sentences that are often complex, as they must be to be accurate, but always clear (after sufficient attention has been paid). A stylist may find some awkwardness in the hyphenated compound words and the noun clauses he prefers to the polysyllabic Latinate words often found in English versions of Aristotle. But these blunt locutions — along with Sachs’ excellent notes — manage to convey both the richness of meaning and the clarity of thought of their Greek antecedents. The resulting translation may strike some as awkward in style, but it will strike the careful reader who cares about what is translated as elegant (in the way mathematicians use that word).”

—Jerry L. Thompson, Author, Truth and Photography

From the Publisher

The translations of Joe Sachs are a great gift to Greekless amateurs like me. He uses simple, unambiguous words joined into sentences that are often complex, as they must be to be accurate, but always clear (after sufficient attention has been paid). A stylist may find some awkwardness in the hyphenated compound words and the noun clauses he prefers to the polysyllabic Latinate words often found in English versions of Aristotle. But these blunt locutions — along with Sachs' excellent notes — manage to convey both the richness of meaning and the clarity of thought of their Greek antecedents. The resulting translation may strike some as awkward in style, but it will strike the careful reader who cares about what is translated as elegant (in the way mathematicians use that word). (Jerry L. Thompson, Author, Truth and Photography)

Jerry L. Thompson

I find the Introduction extremely convincing, lucid, learned, fair to past scholarship, and truly illuminating about the meaning of tragedy in general and about the very specific acceptions of hamartia, katharsis, ekplêxis, and thauma, in the context of an appropriate understanding of the Poetics. Another remarkable feature is the dexterity and ease with which it draws on all the relevant parts of the Aristotelian corpus to shed light on troublesome textual passages in the Poetics. Finally, the style of the Introduction is straightforward, free of unnecessary jargon, direct, and economical, the best interpretation of the Poetics I ever read. (Sabetai Unguru, Tel Aviv University)

Sabetai Unguru

Joe Sachs, known and respected for his excellent translations of Aristotle, deserves great praise for this new translation of Plato's Republic. Based on the latest definitive edition of the Greek text and guided by a sense that Greek in English need not read like an old, foreign tongue, Sachs' translation captures the flow of the conversation in an English that reads smoothly, even when the ideas expressed force one to pause and look again. Fluid, yet accurate, Sachs' translation allows the thoughtful reader deeper entry into this all-important book. The editorial guides and typographical signs to remind the reader of who has joined the argument most recently are all highly helpful and most welcome. I look forward to reading this with students. (Charles E. Butterworth, University of Maryland)

Charles E. Butterworth