Poetics (Penguin Classics S.)

We must be careful here. Poetic plots do not deal in generalizations (‘people usually get up in the morning’); they make statements about what a particular individual does at a particular time (‘Bill got up this morning’).

The theoretical framework for this outline history of poetry is provided by the first three chapters, which construct a matrix of three different ways in which poems can be distinguished from other kinds of imitation and from each other – in terms of their medium, object and mode.

he is aware that social and institutional factors, as well as individual incompetence, may inhibit the continued realization of the optimum form (51b35–52a1, 53a33–5). Clearly, then, Aristotle saw the history of poetry as a social, and not simply as a natural, phenomenon.7

A famous definition states what tragedy is; from this Aristotle deduces the constituent parts of tragedy; he then ranks these constituents in order of importance, giving primacy to plot.

Tragedy, like all poetry, is an imitation. Specifically, it is an imitation of a certain kind of action. So one constituent part of tragedy is plot, the ordered sequence of events which make up the action being imitated. An action is performed by agents, and agents necessarily have moral and intellectual characteristics, expressed in what they do a

Aristotle’s contention, then, is that human beings are by nature prone to engage in the creation of likenesses, and to respond to likenesses with pleasure, and he explains this instinct by reference to their innate desire for knowledge.

Aristotle calls in Greek tekhnê; the word is conventionally translated as ‘craft’, ‘skill’ or ‘art’, but Aristotle defines tekhnê as a productive capacity informed by an understanding of its intrinsic rationale (cf. Nicomachean Ethics, 1140a20f.).

The implication that epic narrative as such is not imitation seems at first sight to contradict what is said of it elsewhere in the Poetics, but the paradox is only superficial. The purest form of poetic imitation is in the dramatic mode; other modes are imitative, but not in the same degree.

Chapters 13 and 14 address the question of the best kind of tragic plot.