Status Updates From Poetika

"[W]here there is no beauty there can be no catharsis; an ill-written book, like an ill-compounded drug, only irritates the system without purging. Let us then see to it that, if we excite evil passions, it is so done as to sublimate them at the same time by the contemplation of emotional or intellectual beauty." From "Aristotle on Detective Fiction," lecture given at Oxford in 1935 by Dorothy L. Sayers.