Poetics (Penguin Classics S.)

Tragedy, like all poetry, is an imitation. Specifically, it is an imitation of a certain kind of action. So one constituent part of tragedy is plot, the ordered sequence of events which make up the action being imitated. An action is performed by agents, and agents necessarily have moral and intellectual characteristics, expressed in what they do a

We must be careful here. Poetic plots do not deal in generalizations (‘people usually get up in the morning’); they make statements about what a particular individual does at a particular time (‘Bill got up this morning’).

Reversal (peripeteia) is less straightforward. It is emphatically not to be equated with the tragic change of fortune: a change of fortune is a characteristic of all tragic plots, simple as well as complex, while reversal is distinctive to complex plots. But Aristotle’s definition is vague: ‘there is a change to the opposite in the actions being pe

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

Human beings produce, among other things, poems, and the production of poems too can be a tekhnê; it is an activity with its own intrinsic rationale, and it can be rendered intelligible. This does not mean that poets themselves necessarily understand what they are doing. In the Poetics Aristotle does not treat it as a matter of any consequence whet

In general, the ability to do something well does not depend on understanding, nor does understanding necessarily imply an ability to do it well.

Chapters 13 and 14 address the question of the best kind of tragic plot.

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

Recognition reveals that, because things are not what they seemed, what a person has done or is about to do is not what he thought it was