Heath Malcolm - Poetics

Table of Contents

ARISTOTLE was born at Stageira, 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 established his school and research institute, the Lyceum, to which his great erudition attracted a large number of scholars. After Alexanders death in 323, anti-Macedonian feeling drove Aristotle out of Athens, and he fled to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322. His writings, which were of extraordinary range, profoundly affected the whole course of ancient and medieval philosophy, and they are still eagerly studied and debated by philosophers today. Very many of them have survived and among the most famous are the Ethics and the Politics, both of which are published in Penguin Classics, together with The Athenian Constitution, De Anima, The Art of Rhetoric, Poetics and the Metaphysics.

MALCOLM HEATH was born in London in 1957 and was educated in Harrow and at Oxford University. He was a lecturer in Greek for a year at the University of St Andrews, and then at the University of Leeds. Since 2000 he has been Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Leeds. Apart from numerous articles, he has also published The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (1987), Political Comedyin Aristophanes (1987), Unity in Greek Poetics (1989) and Hermogeneson Issues: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric (1995).

Aristotle was much admired in the ancient world for the elegance and clarity of his style. Unfortunately, the writings which earned him that esteem have not survived. What we read today are not the books which Aristotle prepared and polished for publication, but notes (perhaps in many cases lecture-notes) compiled for his own use or the use of his students. This has one great advantage: the Aristotelian works available to us, making no concessions to a lay readership, are the ones which intellectually sophisticated commentators in late antiquity found philosophically most rewarding. But there are also disadvantages. These texts were not designed for public consumption, and are consequently often very difficult to understand. The process by which they took their present form is unclear; in some cases there are signs of editorial activity (either by Aristotle himself or by a later hand); so different versions may have been spliced together, and what is presented as a single continuous text may in fact juxtapose different stages in the development of Aristotles thinking. In general the style is cryptic, condensed and allusive; the Poetics, in particular, contains many passages which are more than usually obscure, as the notes to this translation will testify.

This situation has a paradoxical consequence. The works which did most to disseminate Aristotles ideas on poetry in the ancient world were the three books On Poets (written, like Platos works, in the form of a dialogue and presumably more lucid than the extant Poetics) and the six books of Homeric Problems, which discussed passages in Homer faulted by critics as implausible, inconsistent or morally improper. Except for scattered fragments quoted by other ancient authors these two works have been lost. The Poetics itself does not seem to have been widely known in antiquity. By contrast, since the Renaissance its influence on literary theorists and critics has been massive; but the obscurities of the text have left it open to a wide range of conflicting interpretations. There have been, and still are, fundamental disagreements about the meaning even of key concepts, like hamartia and katharsis.

The historic influence of the Poetics is one reason why it merits continued attention. Much of Western thinking about poetry and drama from the sixteenth century onwards will be obscure to those who are unfamiliar with the text which lies behind it. It is of course possible to take an interest in the variety of meanings which this text has had for successive generations of later readers without concerning oneself with the meanings which Aristotle himself might have been seeking to convey. There are, however, various reasons why it may also be worth taking an interest in what Aristotle meant.

One reason is that it may help us to a better understanding of Greek tragedy. We have in the Poetics an analysis of tragedy by an intelligent and well-informed observer who was much closer, chronologically and culturally, to the plays than we are; it would be irresponsible for the student of Greek tragedy to ignore his testimony. To be sure, Aristotle was not a direct contemporary of the great fifth-century tragedians whose plays have survived; and although he numbered later tragedians (such as Theodectes) among his acquaintances, tragedy in the fourth century was not the same as tragedy in the fifth as Aristotle himself was aware. There is no reason to assume that Aristotles understanding of tragedy was either faultless or uncontroversial. It is widely accepted that he failed to appreciate fully the significance of the gods in fifth-century tragedy; and it is clear from polemical remarks in the Poetics itself that his views on a number of issues diverged from those of some at least of his contemporaries. We must show due caution, then, in using the Poetics as an aid to understanding the nature of Greek tragedy. But that is true of any body of evidence, and is no reason to neglect it.

Another reason why the Poetics is worth studying closely is the quality of its thought. Aristotle had an exceptionally penetrating and subtle intellect. Concepts and arguments which at first seem impenetrable often prove to make illuminating sense when further reflection brings to light their underlying rationale. For me, the challenge of trying to understand Aristotles thought is the main reason why the Poetics continues to be such a rewarding text to study. This desire to understand is something with which Aristotle himself would have been in sympathy; indeed, it provides us with an excellent starting-point in trying to place the Poetics in the broader context of his philosophical work.

All human beings by nature desire knowledge. This, the opening sentence of the Metaphysics (980aI), states a fundamental premise of Aristotles understanding of what it is to be human. He points out as evidence for his claim the pleasure we take in looking at things and assimilating information through our senses. Sensation is of course shared with many other animals, and the accretion of sensation through memory into experience is shared with some. But humans are unique in their capacity to derive universal judgements from their experiences. Animals act by instinct or acquired habit, but humans are capable of acting from understanding: they know (as a dog might know) that this is the thing to do in a certain situation, but they may also understand (as a dog cannot) why it is the thing to do. This is what Aristotle calls in Greek tekhn; the word is conventionally translated as craft, skill or art, but Aristotle defines