The Poetics

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poetics, by Aristotle
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Title: The Poetics
Author: Aristotle
Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6763]
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[This file was first posted on January 24,
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Edition: 10
Language: English
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE

POETICS ***
This eBook was produced by Eric Eldred.
ARISTOTLE
ON THE ART OF POETRY
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 experienced
lecturer, full of jottings and adscripts, with occasional phrases written
carefully out, but never revised as a whole for the general reader. Even
to accomplished scholars the meaning is often obscure, as may be seen
by a comparison of the three editions recently published in England, all
the work of savants of the first eminence, [1] or, still more strikingly,
by a study of the long series of misunderstandings and overstatements
and corrections which form the history of the Poetics since the
Renaissance.
[1] Prof. Butcher, 1895 and 1898; Prof. Bywater, 1909; and Prof.
Margoliouth, 1911.
But it is of another cause of misunderstanding that I wish principally to
speak in this preface. The great edition from which the present
translation is taken was the fruit of prolonged study by one of the
greatest Aristotelians of the nineteenth century, and is itself a classic
among works of scholarship. In the hands of a student who knows even
a little Greek, the translation, backed by the commentary, may lead
deep into the mind of Aristotle. But when the translation is used, as it
doubtless will be, by readers who are quite without the clue provided
by a knowledge of the general habits of the Greek language, there must
arise a number of new difficulties or
misconceptions.
To understand a great foreign book by means of a translation is
possible enough where the two languages concerned operate with a
common stock of ideas, and belong to the same period of civilization.
But between ancient Greece and modern England there yawn immense
gulfs of human history; the establishment and the partial failure of a
common European religion, the barbarian invasions, the feudal system,
the regrouping of modern Europe, the age of mechanical invention, and
the industrial revolution.