Poetics

Aristotle begins his exploration of tragedy with a succinct summary:

Tragedy is a representation of an action of a superior kind—grand, and complete in itself—presented in embellished language, in distinct forms in different parts, performed by actors rather than told by a narrator, effecting, through pity and fear, the purification of such emotions (23).

Tragedy uses rhythmic language—sometimes with musical accompaniment—to achieve its effects. And tragedy is necessarily dramatic, representing characters’ moral choices and subsequent consequences.

Tragedy is thus composed of six elements: “the story, the moral element, the style, the ideas, the staging, and the music” (24). To Aristotle, the story, or plot, is the most critical of these, more so than the nature of any of the characters: People’s actions may come from their morality, but what they believe doesn’t shape their lives nearly as much as how they behave. Plenty of amateur poets can write beautifully about moral character without having learned to string together a plot.

Aristotle proposes to focus on plot, considering it the truly essential piece of the puzzle. A good plot has four major characteristics: completeness, scale, unity, and universality.

Completeness means a plot should have a clear and sensible beginning, middle, and end.

Scale means a plot should cover a digestible span of material, not too small nor too big, but enough to be remembered. Aristotle’s “general formula” for this holds that “an adequate limit of length is a size that permits a transformation from adversity to prosperity, or from prosperity to adversity, in a probable or necessary sequence of events” (27).

Unity means the elements of a plot thematically cohere. Aristotle is stern about poets who mistakenly believe that describing everything that ever happened to a single character is the same as unity. Unity also means leaving things out, depending on how relevant they are to a central idea. If an element of a plot can be cut without making any difference to the final effect, it’s not part of the whole.

Universality means a piece of poetic art deals with grand human themes rather than specific events, treating what could happen rather than what did happen. This quality separates poetry from history. Universality also pertains to necessity—the feeling something has to happen based on what’s come before it. Bad poetry, Aristotle says, is “episodic,” built of incidents feeling neither necessary nor likely.

Finally, the specific kinds of stories tragedies tell should excite “pity and fear” in the listener. It’s better if pity and fear should be inspired by surprising but also meaningful events. Chance incidents just aren’t as affecting as things that seem to happen for a reason: “Think of the time in Argos when Mitys’ murderer was killed by Mitys’ statue falling onto him as he was looking up at it!” (29)

Aristotle further classifies plots as simple or complex. A complex plot involves a discovery or a reversal, while a simple plot does not. A reversal is ironic, like when the messenger who’s supposed to assuage Oedipus’s fears instead reveals his identity and brings about his doom. Discovery is “a change from ignorance to knowledge” and often comes alongside a reversal (30). Recognition scenes are a common example of both these events.

Then, of course, there’s suffering. A tragedy’s discoveries should provoke pity and fear, which takes plenty of human misery: “murders on stage, extreme agony, woundings, and so on” (31).

Structurally, a tragedy is built out of prologue (the introduction before the opening chorus), episode (everything between prologue and finale), finale (anything after the final chorus), and chorus (hymnic interventions in the plot describing or responding to the action).

With structure covered, Aristotle turns to quality. What makes a good tragedy?

A good tragedy, in Aristotle’s view, should feature a complex plot full of horrific events. This plot shouldn’t merely show a good person meeting bad fortune (which just provokes outrage), a bad person meeting good fortune (which doesn’t even evoke sympathy), or a terrible person going from good fortune to bad (which might evoke sympathy, but not pity or fear). That’s because pity is connected to sympathy, and fear is connected to seeing oneself in a character, worrying about sharing their fate.

The main character of a tragedy must therefore be somewhere in the middle: a hero with a fatal flaw (or hamartia), making a terrible mistake. The best plots, Aristotle says, follow this single person over the course of their fall. Less sophisticated audiences prefer plays with different outcomes for the virtuous and wicked, but that’s not truly suitable to tragedy, but to comedy: “In comedy even those who are bitter enemies in the story, like Orestes and Aegisthus, make friends and go off with each other at the end, and nobody gets killed by anybody” (33).

The mere description of a good tragedy’s plot should be enough to inspire pity and terror. Such plots necessarily take place among people who like each other; if enemies fight, that’s only reasonable, and if strangers fight, it doesn’t matter. These characters should check four boxes: They should be morally good, appropriately characterized (for example, a brave woman character should show specifically female bravery rather than a masculine courage), plausible, and consistent in their behavior. Their actions should have clear roots in their personalities, just as the plots they inhabit should proceed through clear cause and effect, not deus ex machina.

Next, Aristotle treats the moment of discovery important to any tragedy. Here again, he believes the best discoveries are naturally born from the action of the tragedy, rather than artificially imposed into it. It’s less elegant for characters to announce their identity, or to be revealed through birthmarks or scars than for their identity to be discovered through plausible, character-driven action.

The way to write a good play, Aristotle advises, is to truly envision and inhabit the scene, internally acting it out as one writes. The poet should also create a broad outline before working out specific episodes.

Each tragedy should also have a complication and an explication: a setup (including what happens before the beginning of the play) and a payoff (what happens once the plot turns from good fortune to bad).

While tragedies have some qualities in common with epic poetry, they should never be built the same way. Epic poetry is lengthy and episodic, where tragedy should be concentrated and digestible. (It never goes well when people try to make plays out of epics, Aristotle observes.)

Aristotle then treats style, providing a comprehensive explanation of language building from single phonemes to metaphors. He notes that meaning is founded on sequence, connectedness, and likeness and analogy can thus be used to give words to wordless things. For instance, the sun can be said to sow its rays, since the scattering of light resembles the scattering of seeds. True genius in poetry is in penning apt metaphors.

Effectively using language in a tragedy, Aristotle says, means being “clear without being vulgar” (45). Some harmonious mixture of believable and elevated speech is necessary: If the characters speak only in slang or only in metaphor, they’ll either be vulgar or absurd. Shaping and modifying the sounds of words via the understanding of language Aristotle just laid out is one way to find a happy medium. But it’s correct that tragedy should sound a little elevated, a little unlike everyday speech: It’s treating characters who are just a bit better than people really are.

Narrative epics have plenty in common with tragedies. These, too, should focus on a single span of action with a beginning, middle, and end relating to each other. (Homer provides the supreme example in his Iliad, which doesn’t try to cover every event of the Trojan wars but centers on one cohesive segment.) There’s also a similar choice to be made between a simple or complex plot, driven by character or by suffering.

The difference between tragedy and epic is in length and the ability to be episodic. While a tragedy needs to focus on a small span of time and events in sequence, epics can take a grand sweep and depict events simultaneously happening in different settings. Epic is also free to use stately heroic verse (dactylic hexameter), where more naturalistic meters are appropriate to staged tragedies.

Homer’s greatness in epic, Aristotle says, is in his refusal to be a puppeteer. All of Homer’s characters are real people and they never speak for him; he vanishes into the work. He’s also a master of probability, never demanding his audience believe anything improbable—though he sometimes asks them to believe something impossible. “Probable impossibilities,” Aristotle argues, “are to be preferred to implausible possibilities” (50).

Aristotle takes a moment here to refute critics objecting to Homer’s impossibilities. Poetic truth is not the same thing as logical truth and a factual error in poetry isn’t a crime against poetry, but against some other discipline: “[I]t is less serious to be ignorant of the fact that a female deer has no horns than to paint a poor representation of one” (51). Poetry can contain impossibilities as long as they serve the poem’s cohesive wholeness.

Context and culture are also important factors to consider when deciding on a poem’s truthfulness: Surrounding circumstances or local idiom might, on examination, make a dubious passage ring true. Idealization—presenting people as better than they are—is another fair excuse.

Finally, Aristotle considers whether tragedy or epic is the superior form. He raises the contemporary argument that tragedy is necessarily vulgar because of the cartoonish or lewd behavior of actors, but dismisses this, observing it is a critique of actors and not of tragedies (and that it’s quite possible to over-egg a reading of an epic, too). Tragedy has the upper hand over epic in its use of music and in its intensity and unity. Summarily, Aristotle believes tragedy the more powerful of the two forms.