page_title: Poetics (Aristotle)
section_title: Influence
hierarchical_section_title: Poetics (Aristotle) / Influence
caption_attribution_description: English: Arabic translation of Aristotle's Poetics by Abu Bishr Matta Français&#160;: Poétique (Aristote) en arabe - Abu Bishr Matta العربية: فن الشعر لأرسطوطاليس نقل أبي بشر متى - من مخطوطة باريس ٢٣٤٦
context_page_description: Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. In this text Aristotle offers an account of ποιητικῆς, which refers to poetry or more literally "the poetic art," deriving from the term for "poet; author; maker," ποιητής.
  Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama, lyric poetry, and epic. The genres all share the function of mimesis, or imitation of life, but differ in three ways that Aristotle describes:
  Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody.
  Difference of goodness in the characters.
  Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out.
  The analysis of tragedy in the Poetics constitutes the core of the discussion. Although the text is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions". The work was lost to the Western world for a long time. It was available in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by Averroes.
context_section_description: The Arabic version of Aristotle's Poetics that influenced the Middle Ages was translated from a Greek manuscript dated to some time prior to the year 700. This manuscript, translated from Greek to Syriac, is independent of the currently-accepted 11th-century source designated Paris 1741.  The Syriac-language source used for the Arabic translations departed widely in vocabulary from the original Poetics and it initiated a misinterpretation of Aristotelian thought that continued through the Middle Ages. Paris 1741 appears online at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France).
  Arabic scholars who published significant commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics included Avicenna, Al-Farabi and Averroes. Many of these interpretations sought to use Aristotelian theory to impose morality on the Arabic poetic tradition. In particular, Averroes added a moral dimension to the Poetics by interpreting tragedy as the art of praise and comedy as the art of blame.
  Averroes' interpretation of the Poetics was accepted by the West, where it reflected the "prevailing notions of poetry" into the 16th century.
  Recent scholarship has challenged whether Aristotle focuses on literary theory per se (given that not one poem exists in the treatise) or whether he focuses instead on dramatic musical theory that only has language as one of the elements.
  The lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics is a core plot element (and the “macguffin”) in Umberto Eco's bestseller novel, The Name of the Rose.
caption: Arabic translation of the Poetics by Abū Bishr Mattā.
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