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Updated: June 25, 2025
Thus of the twenty-six books into which the Poetics is conventionally divided, five are devoted to the general theory of poetry, three to diction, two to epic, and sixteen to drama. Although Aristotle includes dithyrambic, nomic, satiric, and lyric poetry in his discussion, he practically ignores them.
The results which bear upon the present inquiry may be summarized as follows: The recovery of Aristotle's Poetics brought about a complete change in poetical theory, and stimulated in Italy a great body of critical writing and discussion, the results of which did not reach England until almost a hundred years later.
They give us occasion to think and use our imagination. They make us, to the best of our powers, try really to follow and criticize closely the bold gropings of an extraordinary thinker; and it is in this process, and not in any mere collection of dogmatic results, that we shall find the true value and beauty of the Poetics.
In order, however, that we may view the matter in its true light, I must first say a few words on the Poetics of Aristotle, those few pages which have given rise to such voluminous commentaries. It is well established that this treatise is merely a fragment, for it does not even touch upon many important matters.
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully." And at the very end of the Poetics, where he is endeavoring to prove that tragedy is a higher art than epic, he does so by showing that drama has all the epic elements, and in addition music and spectacle, which produce the most vivid of pleasures.
Lessing, for example, in the Hamburgische Dramaturgic wrote that the laws laid down by Aristotle in the Poetics were as certain in their application to the drama as Euclid's Elements in geometry.
With the turn of the century, he goes on to say, a great change was brought about by the publication of the classical critical writings, especially the Poetics of Aristotle. Then the mediaeval criteria of doctrina and eloquentia were superseded by many new ones.
Berlin, 1859. pp. 379, 339. These are not always given exactly as in the originals, although the sense is preserved intact. Yes, Beethoven himself is in theory of this opinion. "Aristotle, in his 'Poetics, remarks, 'Tragic heroes must at first live in great happiness and splendor. This we see in Egmont.
And the Poetics cannot be accounted an exception. For one thing the treatise is fragmentary. It originally consisted of two books, one dealing with Tragedy and Epic, the other with Comedy and other subjects. We possess only the first. For another, even the book we have seems to be unrevised and unfinished.
In an average page of French or German philosophy nearly all the nouns can be translated directly into exact equivalents in English; but in Greek that is not so. Scarcely one in ten of the nouns on the first few pages of the Poetics has an exact English equivalent. Every proposition has to be reduced to its lowest terms of thought and then re-built.
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