What are the key features of Aristotle's The Poetics?

Aristotle’s Poetics has many important features, from its influence on literary theory, to the notion of catharsis, to its description of the elements and rules of tragedy.

Before the Poetics, no one had seriously written about what makes a work of literature or drama good or bad. Plato had touched on the topic in The Republic, but limited himself to an attack on fiction as a whole and concluded with the decision that poets and writers should be banned because all they do is lie, and lying is bad for society. Aristotle took literature and fiction as an established fact and ventured out to see what sets a good work apart from a bad one.

In so doing, Aristotle categorized the types of literature, from poetry to epic to drama, and laid out what elements they have in common with one another. For example, Aristotle noted that all dramas have plots, characters, thought (a character’s reasoning for doing something), speech, music, and spectacle. There were also certain rules that should be complied in order to make a work a good one. For example, Aristotle was convinced that characters should be at least as good or ethical as their audience, or else the audience would not look up to them, and that the plot should center around one important discovery.

All of these elements and rules, according to Aristotle, led in the direction of the goal of literature: His concept of catharsis. This was a feeling of fear or pity in the members of the audience towards what they were seeing. Unlike his predecessor Plato, who was convinced that all fiction was inherently useless, Aristotle thought that, by producing catharsis in the audience, works of fiction were valuable because they let the audience experience feelings that they wouldn’t experience otherwise and allowed the work to be an outlet for pent up feelings that would be destructive if held inside.

What are the main ideas of Aristotle's literary criticism in "Poetics"?

One mistake students often make when approaching Aristotle's Poetics is to assume that he understood poetry in the same way that we do. In fact, Aristotle defines "poetry" as any form of writing that seeks to "mime" or imitate the real lives of humans through the use of language and rhetorical features. As such, for Aristotle, "poetry" is any kind of writing or spoken poetry, be it drama or verse, in any genre.

That being said, Aristotle acknowledges his limitations and does not attempt to cover the entirety of human output, instead limiting his discussion to tragedy and epic poetry. Looking first to his definition of tragedy, we can see that many of Aristotle's ideas of what constitutes tragedy survived into our modern understanding. For Aristotle, the point of tragedy is catharsis, or the lifting and purging of emotions in the audience. For this reason, good tragedy must have a plot, a character who is sympathetic, good use of language/harmony and melody (remember that Greek tragedy would include a sung chorus, but this can be applied more widely to mean pleasing language), spectacle (it should look impressive), thought, and diction. So, good tragedy means not only a particular type of plot, but also appropriate use of language, staging, and harmony or rhyme. As in Elizabethan tragedy—think of Shakespeare—all tragedy should include downfall resulting from the hero's fatal flaw.

In discussing epic poetry, Aristotle largely describes it as similar to tragedy in its plot, but differing in style. Epic poetry should include similar characters, thoughts and ideas, but is usually longer and less seated in the real world, dealing more in the realms of monsters, gods and the improbable. In Aristotle's view, tragedy is the superior form of mimesis.

What is Aristotle's main argument in "Poetics"?

At the center of Aristotle's Poetics is the contention that nothing can be understood separately from it purpose (telos). He states that the goal of poetry is a certain type of pleasure; likewise tragedy provides the purging of emotions, which provides well-being for humans. These forms of art, like all arts have as their basis mimesis, or imitation. In Poetics 4, Artistole explains that art, thus, informs,

Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he' 

Further, Aristotle argues that there are three differences in artistic imitation: "the medium, the objects, and the manner." Of course, in Aristotle's time, the medium was limited to poetry or drama; the objects are men in action, who may be noble or villainous. These men in action, however, are subordinate to the plot which is essential to all imitative works. Finally, manner refers to narration. That is, in Homer's poetry, for instance, the voice of the narrator can be his own, or he can assume another voice.

Perhaps, the most important and largest part of his Poetics is Aristotle's discussion of tragedy (the section on comedy has been lost) as the dramatic form that imitates a serious and complete action that arouses pity and fear, leading to a catharsis, or purging of emotions. This imitation of life is both pleasurable and instructive. The elements of tragedy are discussed in the order of their importance:

1. plot - "the soul of tragedy"
2. character - personages who further the action of the plot
3. thought -dialogue that is "possible and pertinent"
4. diction - "the expression of the meaning in words"
5. embellishments - song is the most important of these 

One of Aristotle's arguments is that the mimesis (imitation) of divine truths is the poets special calling and that to convey these divine truths for which humans spiritually hunger the poet must convey every possible realization (i.e., manifestation) of that truth, e.g., every type and shade of love and loving from every type of person who are cast as characters in the poetry. Concordantly, one on his proofs for this argument was that poets are divinely inspired thus able to rightly and truthfully portray all the variations of a truth. His counter-argument to his own argument of inspiration was that alternatively poets were "mad" and unable to sustain their own individual personality.

What are the main issues Aristotle presents in his Poetics?

In his Poetics, Aristotle writes about two major types of Greek poetry, dramatic and epic. The treatment of dramatic poetry is limited to tragedy in the extant text; an additional book on comedy has been lost, although some scholars argue that the Tractatus Coislinianus is based on an epitome of the missing book on  comedy. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines poetry as imitation by means of words, using direct mimesis in drama and a mixture of mimesis and diegesis on epic. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, should be comprised of a single action of a certain seriousness and operates by means of fear and pity to acheive a catharsis of the pathemata.