Aristotle - The Poetics - Limitations

 

Aristotle - The Poetics

Limitations 

Aristotle has his limitations. In the first place he assigns a higher rank to tragedy than it deserves. In doing so he forgets his own scientific approach and follows the established tradition. The epic in which success is so difficult to achieve that about a dozen great epics are all that the world can boast of, is assigned the second rank. The succeeding ages were quick to see that unity of action is more difficult of attainment in the sprawling length of an epic than in the shorter compass of a tragedy, so he who can succeed in the former should be the greater artist, there being no difference between the two in other respects.

Aristotle himself bestows more praise on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey for their artistry in plot, character, thought and diction on the same things in his favorite tragedian Sophocles. The omission of the lyric, a major poetical form right from the earliest times in ‘a treatise concerning poetry’, particularly after Pindar had shown what could be done with it, is also inexplicable.

Aristotle is also more concerned with the form of the literary types he deals with than with their content and so lays down rules only for the former. But perhaps Poetics was not intended to be a comprehensive review of all the problems of poetry. It seems to concern itself only with those that, in the opinion of Aristotle, had not been correctly understood. Its incompleteness is another explanation. However, for the largeness of its view-scientific, historical, philosophical, psychological- and the depth of its observation, it is even in its fragmentary form, one those rare books that have powerfully moved mankind.