Aristotle on the Art of Poetry: An Amplified Version with Supplementary Illustrations for Students of EnglishHarcourt, Brace, 1913 - 101 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
Accordingly Achilles action actors Aeschylus agents Aristotle Aristotle's arouse art of poetry artistic imitation audience beginning catharsis change of fortune CHAPTER character choral Chorus Comedy comic Creon critics Cypria Dénouement dialogue Dianoia Diction difference Discovery distinction Dorians drama proper emotions Empedocles employ Epic Poetry epic poets episode Ethos Euripides example function genus Greek hamartia happiness hence hero Homer iambic ideal identity Iliad illustrated incidents Iphigenia kind King Lear Lear Little Iliad means medium of imitation Melody ment metaphors metre metrical language misery moral nature Noun object Odysseus Oedipus the King Orestes Othello oureas person pity and fear play pleasure plot poem Poetics Polygnotus possible principle repre represent Reversal rhythm Semivowels sense sequence Shakespeare song Sophocles species Spectacle speech stage story strange words Taurians term Theodectes thing thought tion traditional Tragedy tragic effect tragic poets treatise true unhappy ending uninvolved unity utterance Verb verse vowels whole
Popular passages
Page 93 - Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus ; but use all gently ; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
Page xv - I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar...
Page xv - Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe.
Page xvi - Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative...
Page 27 - It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.
Page 31 - The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with metre no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.
Page 58 - I have often observed that, on mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frighted, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that passion whose appearance I endeavoured to imitate...
Page xvi - ... you images of true matters, such as indeed were done, and not such as fantastically or falsely may be suggested to have been done.
Page 28 - We have laid it down that a tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole of some magnitude; for a whole may be of no magnitude to speak of. Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.
Page xvi - I adopt with full faith the principle of Aristotle, that poetry as poetry is essentially * ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a class...