Aristotle's "Poetics"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how Aristotle feels all art should be judged. In this way, the classification schemes introduced in "Poetics" are represented. There is extensive discussion of how art springs from human instinct. Finally, the paper deals with Aristotle's conclusion that tragic poetry is the highest form of art.

From the Paper:

"The following essay is simply a thorough and systematic summary of Aristotle's Poetics. I found it hard to characterize the Poetics in broad terms, because Aristotle is very concise in this work. With that said I found that going through and consolidating each section of the work was the best way to go about characterizing the Poetics as a whole. Basically this essay is my own reconstruction of the Poetics, which I have tried to present free of extraneous material and in an unbiased fashion. I can only hope that I have effectively conveyed Aristotle's true meaning, and have not degraded his insights in any large way. In his Poetics Aristotle basically starts with the premise that all art is a form of imitation, and accordingly so is poetry. The function of the poet, and any artist, is then to imitate, not particular the particular but the universal features of his/her observation. These Universals would be things like the form or essence of the observed "real" situation, which we idealize mentally. Further, poetry is an act of creation, because it is not direct copy of real life. While it is not a copy it is an actualized idealization of the artists mental image of a real event or thing. Thus, art must be closer to reality than an observational experience of a real situation, because a universal is more encompassing of reality than a particular. Although all arts imitate reality is this fashion they differ in four fundamental ways, that is the media they employ, objects they actually imitate, manor or method of imitation, and their function or purpose."

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