Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T05:14:06.278Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aristotle's Approach to Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

B. R. Rees
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.

5. E.g. Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Development, 2nd ed., translated by Robinson, R. (Oxford, 1948)Google Scholar.

6. Lloyd, , op. cit., p. 28Google Scholar.

7. Russell, and Winterbottom, , op. cit., pp. 85–6Google Scholar.

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

9. Lloyd, , op. cit., p. 274Google Scholar; cf. pp. 286–7 and Schaper, E., Prelude to Aesthetics (London, 1968), p. 145 n. 8 and p. 150 n. 21Google Scholar.

10. Grene, M., A Portrait of Aristotle (London, 1963), p. 21Google Scholar; cf. p. 34.

11. See Lloyd, , op. cit., pp. 25–6Google Scholar.

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.

14. Olson, , op. cit., pp. 183–4Google Scholar.

15. See Solmsen, F., ‘The Origin and Method of Aristotle's Poetics’, CQ 27 (1935), 198Google Scholar.

16. Daiches, D., Critical Approaches to Literature (London, 1956), p. 24Google Scholar.

17. Crane, R. S., The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto, 1953),p. 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. See Gulley, N., Aristotle on the Purposes of Literature (University of Wales, 1971), pp. 1–5Google Scholar; cf. Havelock, E. A., Preface to Plato (Oxford, 1963), p. 33 n. 37Google Scholar: ‘neither “art” nor “artist”, as we use the words,is translatable into archaic or high-classical Greek.’

19. Schaper, , op. cit., p. 67Google Scholar.

20. Daiches, , op. cit., p. 24Google Scholar.

21. The modern reader, however, is warned that the Greek terms for genus and species are often used in ways confusing to him; see Peck, , op. cit., p. lxvGoogle Scholar.

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

23. Schaper, , op. cit., pp. 65–6Google Scholar.

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

25. Dale, A. M., ‘The Creation of Dramatic Characters’ in Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1969), p. 273Google Scholar, and Schaper, , op. cit., p. 71Google Scholar; cf. Daiches, , op. cit., pp. 28, 36Google Scholar; Crane, , op. cit., p. 68Google Scholar; and Grene, , op. cit., p. 233Google Scholar: ‘for parts in complete isolation from such concrete, binding context are not even parts.’

26. E.g. Atkins, J. W. H., Literary Criticism in Antiquity (Cambridge, 1934), I. p. 117Google Scholar: ‘Of tragedy as an interpretation of life he says but little. He nowhere refers to the great problems that give vitality to Greek tragedy, problems relating to man and his cosmic relations, to the workings of Fate, human destiny and the like.’ As Crane, , op. cit., p. 77Google Scholar, well comments: ‘But it surely does not follow from this… that he was “unaware”…of the existence of such questions.’

27. Lucas, D. W., Aristotle, Poetics, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1972), p. 239Google Scholar.

28. Grene, , op. cit., p. 41Google Scholar.

29. Lucas, , op. cit., p. 239, note on 1461a 1Google Scholar.

30. Russell, D. A., “Longinus” on the Sublime (Oxford, 1964), p. xlviiiGoogle Scholar.

31. Skutsch, O., Alfred Edward Housman 1859–1936 (London, 1960), p. 5Google Scholar.

32. See Harriott, R., Poetry and Criticism before Plato (London, 1969), pp. 80–91Google Scholar.

33. Crane, , op. cit., p. 65Google Scholar.

34. Stanford, W. B., Enemies of Poetry (London, 1980), p. 77Google Scholar; cf. pp. 4–5.

35. Schaper, , op. cit., p. 60Google Scholar.

36. Lucas, , op. cit., p. 212, note on 1459a 5–7Google Scholar.

37. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

38. Stanford, , op. cit., p. 68Google Scholar.

39. Lucas, , op. cit., p. 258Google Scholar.

40. Stanford, , op. cit., p. 68Google Scholar.

41. Olson, , op. cit., pp. 189–90Google Scholar; cf. Crane, , op. cit., p. 77Google Scholar.

42. ‘A Note on the Poetics’ in Olson, , op. cit., p. 103Google Scholar.