Reading notebook: Aristotle, The Poetics

"Tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought; for it is by these that we qualify actions themselves and these -- thought and character -- that are the two natural causes from which actions spring, and on actions again all success or failure depends."

Key words: tragedy, epic, imitation, action, object, manner, medium, plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, song, recognition, reversal

Summary: Aristotle attempts to categorize and describe the various poetic forms, noting "the essential qualities" thereof. He proceeds by breaking down Tragedy into its constituent elements -- the uses of which he discusses -- and by describing ideal content and plot structure. Furthermore, he makes some commentary on the function of poetry: "not to relate what has happened, but what may happen -- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity," which makes poetry "a more philosophical and higher thing than history" -- which (supposedly) tells what has happened -- because poetry "tends to express the universal, history the particular."

Initial response: I think Aristotle's method is more interesting than his conclusions. The incessant (more or less phenomenological) categorization in search of some elusive "essential quality" of poetry is revealing, even if it never actually reaches its goal (one of the last remarks, in fact, is about an element of Tragedy which is not inherent [read: essential]). I have to disagree with a lot of what he has to say, of course -- about the active role of the poet's voice in the work, about the use of the fantastic and the improbably in art, about the suppression of the irrational in favor of the rational, about the existence of actions necessarily implying a personal agent, and so forth. But all of this is to be expected, from Classical Athens. At least Aristotle isn't as downright terrible as Plato -- the points of their disagreement are also very interesting to watch.