Poetics (Penguin Classics S.)

In general, the ability to do something well does not depend on understanding, nor does understanding necessarily imply an ability to do it well.

There is therefore a close parallel between reversal and recognition: both reveal that the situation in which a character has been acting was misinterpreted. Reversal reveals that, because things are not what they seemed, the outcome of a person’s actions will be other than what had been expected

The point is that this change affects the good or bad fortune of the person involved: Oedipus learns that he has killed his father and married his mother, and this recognition is the final blow that shatters his world.

Human beings produce, among other things, poems, and the production of poems too can be a tekhnê; it is an activity with its own intrinsic rationale, and it can be rendered intelligible. This does not mean that poets themselves necessarily understand what they are doing. In the Poetics Aristotle does not treat it as a matter of any consequence whet

Aristotle identifies two variables in this change, which between them determine our emotional response to it: one is the direction of change (from good fortune to bad, or from bad to good); the other is the moral status of the person or persons involved in the change (virtuous or wicked).

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.).

This passage in chapter 4 of the Poetics is one of many in which Aristotle refers to painting and the visual arts in order to make a point about poetry. He regards these analogies as valid because he believes both painting and poetry to be forms of mimêsis, a word which I shall translate as ‘imitation’.4 Many scholars would object to this rendering

His hypothesis is that it originated as an adaptation of improvisatory poetic forms in which a soloist led and responded to a chorus (49a9–14); the distinction between chorus and chorus-leader opens up the possibility of dialogue, and hence of drama. The leader thus became the first actor;

any plot must satisfy if it is to be well-formed.