[In this brief overview, Cooper reviews such textual issues as the date of composition of Poetics and the possible sources on which Aristotle drew to write the treatise. Cooper also discusses the structure, function, and goal of poetry as analyzed by Aristotle.]

The Poetics of Aristotle is brief, at first sight hard and dry, and yet one of the most illuminating and influential books ever produced by the sober human mind. After twenty-two centuries it remains the most stimulating and helpful of all analytical works dealing with poetry—and poetry is the most vital and lasting achievement of man. This pregnant treatise, dating from some time before the year 323 B. C., is indeed short and condensed. Castelvetro's famous 'exposition' of it (Vienna, 1570) fills 768 pages, and runs to something like 384,000 words. The Poetics itself contains perhaps 10,000 words. In the great Berlin edition of Aristotle (1831) it takes up only 30 columns of print, or 15 pages; in the last notable edition of the Poetics, that of Bywater (1909), the text occupies 45 pages out of 431. The Poetics makes about a hundredth part of the extant works of Aristotle.

Though never long, it doubtless once was longer; and it probably was associated with another work of Aristotle, now represented only by fragments, his dialogue On Poets, and with his Homeric Problems. In the same group of writings were the Peplos and the Didascaliæ, the latter a history or record of the Greek dramatic contests, with the names of victors and similar data. The dialogue On Poets seems to have been of a more literary character. At all events the Poetics does not now resemble the finished work of that Aristotle whose style was praised by Cicero and Quintilian. What we have of it may be the notes that served the master through various years for some part of his lectures; such notes he would expand in oral discussion, adding examples, reconciling apparent contradictions, solving difficulties with his pupils in the Peripatetic fashion. The defence of Homer toward the end of the book connects it with the Problems, and the last chapter, on the relative merits of epic and tragic poetry, has the look of an embryo dialogue. Or we may have in the Poetics the notes of some person who attended Aristotle's lectures and colloquies—a hypothesis that would explain omissions and discrepancies that troubled the last generation of modern scholars. Or, finally, the work may be the grudging abstract by some student of the Alexandrian age or later, who took the essentials from one book or section by the master, and therewith joined what seemed important or germane from one or two others. There may have been several steps in the reduction of the Poetics to its present state, which it had reached some time before the sixth century A. D. If so, the history of the treatise would resemble that of Greek learning as a whole in the gradual decay of scholarship and science, until in the Dark Ages the rich and detailed investigations of the Alexandrian period—in biology, for example—had dwindled to the barest epitomes. There is at least one unexpected gap in our Poetics. The treatise does not fulfil its own promise regarding a discussion of comedy; certain scholars have found the promise redeemed in a fragment known as the Tractatus Coislinianus, the merest outline, descended from a body of critical doctrine, now lost, of wider range than the extant Poetics.

We have no adequate knowledge about the composition of Aristotle's works in literary criticism. His Rhetoric, though the text is now corrupt, fared better in the Graeco-Roman world than the Poetics, meeting the practical needs of Roman orators. We do not know when either treatise was written, yet there has been a tendency to regard the Poetics as the earlier. Doubtless both existed side by side during some part of Aristotle's activity as teacher, and underwent occasional revision at his hands. After his death the Rhetoric was included in a body of like treatises, now mostly of uncertain origin. But the Poetics is the only technical discussion of its subject that has come down to us from ancient Greece. For the study of Greek art, including poetic art, it is, after the masterpieces themselves, the most valuable document we have from antiquity.

In its own time, however, it was not a solitary work; and it had predecessors as well as contemporaries in its field. Here Aristotle did not, as in the Topica, feel that he labored as a pioneer, but had models on which to improve. In Poetics 8 he suggests that Homer may have worked with conscious art. If a full-fledged theory of rhetoric came from the Sicilian to the Athenian orators, why, we may ask, should not a theory of the poetic art come to the Athenian drama, if not from Sicily, then from Asia Minor—from Miletus or Smyrna—along with a body of epic tradition that furnished subject-matter for the Attic stage? The more we learn of early Ægean culture, and of its persistence at the Sicilian and Ionian fringes when the centre was swept away, the greater seems the debt of Athens to that culture for the seeds of art and science. Some notions of Homeric rules of art, accordingly, may have drifted down to the predecessors of Aristotle with the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Republic Plato makes Socrates speak of the 'ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.' How early did the naughty Homeric tales of the gods, of Mars and Venus, become a topic of debate between moralist and literary critic? The Poetics notes that Xenophanes (fl. 530 B. C.) thought them very bad, and implicitly takes issue with the Republic for likewise condemning them with no appeal to standards of art.

But the foregoing are vaguer considerations. There is evidence in Plato's Phœdrus, as in the Poetics, that Sophocles consciously observed dramatic laws. And, among other sayings, he declared that Æschylus 'did right without knowing why'; he himself, then, composed aright, knowing why. The Poetics records a maxim of Agathon on dramatic probability; and indeed, in acting and staging their plays, and in training the chorus and actors, the tragic poets must have reflected much on their art. That the great dramatists had a store of reflections is evinced by Aristophanes' Frogs, which in effect is the work of a great literary critic, and shows the poet to be familiar with tragic technique, and with stock terms and methods of criticism; his comic purpose should not blind us to his actual knowledge. Another (lost) play of Aristophanes was itself called Poiesis, while of his contemporaries Plato (not the philosopher) produced a Poet and Poets, and Nicochares likewise a Poet. These comedies were the forerunners of those with similar titles in the age of Aristotle: Poets and Poetry by Alexis, Poiesis by Antiphanes, and a Poet each by Biottus and Pheenicides.

In prose, it has been assumed that the Dialogues of Plato were background and incentive to the treatise of Aristotle; it is often held that the Poetics is a defence of poetry against the attacks of Socrates upon Homer and the dramatists in Books 2, 3, and 10 of the Republic. But the prose background was larger. The circle to which Plato belonged was a group of theorists and investigators,¹ including botanists, students of biology, of grammar, of music—of art and science in general. Among other disciples of Socrates, we find Crito, Simmias of Thebes, and Simon, who produced, according to Diogenes Laertius, works discussing poetry and fine art. Of uncertain date, but a precursor of Aristotle, was a Democritus who wrote a treatise On Poetry and another on Rhythms and Harmony. And again, of the members of the Platonic school, Speusippus dealt with rhetoric and art, while Xenocrates wrote on oratorical and literary problems; the learned Heracleides of Pontus wrote on music, and on poetry and the poets. In the Poetics Aristotle himself alludes a dozen times or more to critical treatises bearing on his subject; he mentions by name the authors Protagoras, Hippias of Thasos, Eucleides, Glaucon, and Ariphrades. Their works are lost; his alone remains, if not as he might have chosen to leave it for posterity, yet in a shape by which the world has benefited, and can benefit more. We may suppose that from this body of writings he as usual eliminated the chaff, and reorganized the essentials, synthesizing, emphasizing, subordinating, filling out in a large and luminous perspective. Through him we probably owe much to his contemporaries and predecessors.

At the same time the Poetics must be thought an original work, based upon observation and comparison of many narrative poems, and a thousand Greek dramas of which we now have but a fraction. Our author had an ample assortment of cases for study. And though he took all knowledge for his province, neglecting perhaps no subject cultivated by the Greeks save geography, though he brought to the analysis of poetic art a mind exercised in philosophy, ethics, politics, logic, psychology, and rhetoric, we should remember that he was the son of a physician, had himself a medical training, and was, if one thing more than another, what we call a biologist. He is interested in life and the principles of life. He therefore studies poetry, a form of life, as a philosophical and also a specialized anatomist and physiologist. He considers its structure and its function. Above all is he concerned with the function and ultimate purpose of it. The common mistake of unoriginal students, in our day as in his, has been to dissect a poem—a complete organism—without regard to the meaning and purpose of the whole. It is the mistake of pedants who divide a masterpiece, and do not rejoin the parts in living union; and thus their pupils, who love life, come to hate the work—of Milton, say—that they are 'studying.' But the originality of Aristotle helps us to relive the life of Greek epic and dramatic poetry. Dry (not dull) though his treatise may at first appear, I have yet to meet the student, mature enough to grasp the outline of a narrative or a drama, whose interest can not be quickened by applying to the narrative or drama the Aristotelian principles of life and art.

The Poetics does not merely help us to appreciate the few Greek dramas that survive, to imagine the other Greek critical treatises from which it partly sprang, and to feel that almost every critical problem our minds conceive was broached by the Greeks; it also tells us much concerning the vast body of Greek dramas that are lost, and yields much of our information regarding Greek stage-practice. We have but 7 whole plays by Æschylus, who is said to have written from 70 to 90; but 7 by Sophocles, who is credited with 123; and but 18 or (with the Rhesus) 19 by Euripides, who wrote perhaps 92. Of late, considerable fragments have been regained of an eighth play, the Trackers, by Sophocles. Of the 160 plays by Chœrilus, somewhat earlier than, Æschylus, we know almost nothing. Of tragedy in Aristotle's own lifetime we have possibly one example, the Rhesus, if that is not by Euripides. Yet, including the fifty plays which his own friend Theodectes produced with conspicuous success, Aristotle could easily have read, from those of Chœrilus down, well over a thousand Greek tragedies. Most of these, when we hear of them at all, are to us little more than names; some, at best, survive in chance fragments of a few lines only. Then, in addition to the 11 plays of Aristophanes that have come down to us, Aristotle must have known the lost works of that author, not to mention other poets of the Old Comedy, such as Cratinus and Eupolis, or the mass of plays in the age succeeding—the so-called Middle Comedy, which we must mainly judge by the quotations by Athenæus.

But we should not expect too much from the Poetics. The treatise as its stands tells us little about Greek Comedy. And if we go to it for light on poetry as this is vaguely conceived by modern readers we shall be disappointed. Nowadays people think of poetry as versified composition about vernal flowers and the breath of 'nature.' When they meet lyrical effusions like Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, or Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, or anything else in which they hear of the human soul being reabsorbed into the world-soul, or of 'a motion and a spirit … that rolls through all things'—in other words, when they meet the notion of divine immanence lyrically expressed, when they meet versified Neoplatonism—readers think they have found true poetry. For the treatise of Aristotle, however, poetry is epic poetry (as Homer is the greatest poet) or dramatic poetry (as tragedy is the noblest poetical type). Aristotle does, indeed, consider the choral odes of tragedy, but not apart from the drama. Had he chosen to examine what we call the lyric, as a separate form, he probably would have done so, not in a treatise on poetry, but in one on music; though to him, as to the Greeks in general, the activities of poet and musical composer were not far apart. In the days of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, a poet wrote both words and music for his drama. The author of the Poetics, coming later, does not boast of a very thorough musical education.

Notes

The plan of the series forbids an inclusion of systematic references in support of many statements in this volume. The works cited in the following Notes, or listed in the Bibliography, do not exhaust the account of the sources to which I am indebted for facts or opinions. Only a few salient references can be given.

¹ 'Investigators': see Hermann Usener, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Leipsic, 1907), p. 83.…