Aristotle: On Poetics

Aristotle stresses how imitation is a natural thing for human beings to do. Actors, dancers, tragedies and comedies, and people enjoy watching other people imitate other people. Therefore, we have poesis, the act of creating something. Comedy imitates the inferior. Epic poetry, on the other hand, imitates great. It has speech and meter. He elevates tragedy above epic poetry. Tragedy imitates action because being happy or miserable come from ones actions. The people in the tragedies are more devices for the actions to be carried out. Tragedies seem to be plot driven then, in his estimation instead of character driven like the modern emphasis is. He likes stories to have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Aristotle thinks that stories ought to have a consistent single action, and that all of the parts must contribute to this whole. Poesis is about stuff that could happen. Poetry is concerned with universals while history with particulars, according to Aristotle. He hates episodic poetry! He would not have liked modern day TV shows.

I wonder if the notion of "recognition" is from the philosophy that we have all the knowledge of the world inside our heads and are working on "recovering" it, and this is part of the role of the poet. He talks about conflict and resolution, modern day terms, as conflict and unraveling.

He's a formalist in the sense of how he is concerned with meter, and prescriptive in his definitions. I wonder if, being a formalist, he is an idealist, and being an idealist, is where the idea of recognition comes from. Need to study up on Aristotle again.

Epic poetry, he describes has a greater magnitude of impact than regular tragedy. Yet, he seems to think tragedy is the higher art form.