An intellectual adventure of the most stimulating kind. -- The New York Times
This book contains the celebrated Butcher translation of Aristotle's Poetics, faced, page by page, with the complete Greek text ( as reconstructed by Mr. Butcher from Greek, Latin, and Arabic manuscripts). The editor's 300-page exposition and interpretation follows. In his classic commentary, Butcher discusses with insight, sympathy, and great learning Aristotle's ideas and their importance in the history of thought and literature. His scholarly remarks cover art and nature, imitation as an aesthetic term, poetic truth, pleasure as the end of fine art, art and morality, the function of tragedy, the dramatic unities, the ideal tragic hero, plot and character, comedy, and poetic universality. A new 35-page introductory essay, Aristotelian Literary Criticism by John Glassner, discusses the validity of Aristotle's ideas today and their application to contemporary literature.
No edition with commentary can be recommended to English readers with such confidence as Butcher's. -- George Saintsbury
One of the finest treatises on aesthetic theory -- neither the literature nor the criticism of the past 40 years has rendered Aristotelian criticism irrelevant or obsolete. -- Modern Schoolman
