The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poetics, by Aristotle

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Title: The Poetics

Author: Aristotle

Commentator: Gilbert Murray

Translator: Ingram Bywater

Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6763]
Posting Date: May 2, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POETICS ***

Produced by Eric Eldred

ON THE ART OF POETRY

By Aristotle

Translated By Ingram Bywater

With A Preface By Gilbert Murray

Oxford At The Clarendon Press
First Published 1920
Reprinted 1925, 1928, 1932, 1938, 1945, 1947
1951, 1954, 1959. 1962 Printed In Great Britain

PREFACE

In the tenth book of the _Republic_, when Plato has completed his final
burning denunciation of Poetry, the false Siren, the imitator of things
which themselves are shadows, the ally of all that is low and weak in
the soul against that which is high and strong, who makes us feed the
things we ought to starve and serve the things we ought to rule, he
ends with a touch of compunction: 'We will give her champions, not poets
themselves but poet-lovers, an opportunity to make her defence in plain
prose and show that she is not only sweet--as we well know--but also
helpful to society and the life of man, and we will listen in a kindly
spirit. For we shall be gainers, I take it, if this can be proved.'
Aristotle certainly knew the passage, and it looks as if his treatise on
poetry was an answer to Plato's challenge.

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
They nearly all need study and comment, and at times help from a good
teacher, before they yield up their secret. And the _Poetics_ cannot be
accounted an exception. For one thing the treatise is fragmentary. It
originally consisted of two books, one dealing with Tragedy and Epic,
the other with Comedy and other subjects. We possess only the first. For
another, even the book we have seems to be unrevised and unfinished. The
style, though luminous, vivid, and in its broader division systematic,
is not that of a book intended for publication. Like most of Aristotle's
extant writing, it suggests the MS. of an experien