Aristotle on the Art of Poetry

by Aristotle

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Pages: 53

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About this book

Aristotle on the Art of Poetry is Ingram Bywater's translation of the Poetics, with a preface by Gilbert Murray. The title page gives 1920 for its first publication at Oxford, and the contents number its parts 1 to 26. Murray's preface begins with the tenth book of Plato's Republic and its denunciation of Poetry.

A passage on translation offers a trial literal rendering of the first paragraph, taking poesis to mean making, so that epic-making, tragedy-making and dithyramb-making become imitations that differ in objects, means and manner. In the text itself, one passage says the finest tragedies are built on the stories of a few houses, those of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes and Telephus, and that critics are wrong to blame Euripides for unhappy endings. Another, on difficulties in the text, looks at punctuation, equivocal terms and Homer's greave of new-wrought tin.

About the author

Aristotle

Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and tutor to Alexander the Great. His writings on ethics, politics, logic, and poetics · including the Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics · shaped Western thought for centuries.