According to chapter 1, poetry is differentiated from other kinds of imitation by the medium in which it produces its likenesses: poetry is imitation in rhythmical language, with or without melodic accompaniment.

‘All human beings by nature desire knowledge.’ This, the opening sentence of the Metaphysics

So in a tragedy without character motivation would be handled impersonally (this is what someone would do in this situation) rather than concretely (this is what a person with this particular set of characteristics would do). Aristotle does not suggest that such a tragedy would be as good as a tragedy with character; in fact, we know from the discu

So the ideal tragic plot cannot be constructed around an exceptionally virtuous person or a wicked person; it must therefore be based on someone between these two – broadly speaking virtuous, but not outstandingly so. Because their virtue is not outstanding, we do not find their downfall morally repellent; because their downfall is undeserved, we c

For Aristotle, the evolution of human culture is in large part the evolution of tekhnê.

Chapter 10 defines two classes of plot. A simple plot satisfies three conditions: the events are ‘in the sense defined continuous and unified’ (that is, connected in accordance with necessity or probability); there is a change of fortune (as specified in chapter 7); and there is no reversal or recognition. A complex plot also satisfies the first tw

Aristotle was born at Stagira, in the dominion of the kings of Macedonia, in 384 BC. For twenty years he studied at Athens in the Academy of Plato, on whose death in 347 he left, and, some time later, became tutor of the young Alexander the Great. When Alexander succeeded to the throne of Macedonia in 336, Aristotle returned to Athens and establish

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

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.