Status Updates From O pesničkoj umetnosti

This book is useful is because the principles can be applied elsewhere. I probably need to read Plato’s Republic and it’s a long read! He attacked Homer for misrepresenting the gods, encouraging debased emotions, and using deceptive and degrading dramatic represention (drama). According to his theory of ideas, material objects are once removed from Ideas and drama is twice removed, appealing to our baser selves.

Content drives form, not meter (keeping in mind that, in Aristotle’s day, science and history were written in meter). The word poetics had a broader meaning to him than it does to us. “Imaginative writing” might best fit what he is discussing in Poetics, which transcends time in its application. This book focuses on tragedy (his treatise on comedy is lost). Epic is treated in the periphery since it is not tragedy.