Poetics

Nonfiction | Book | Adult

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Parts 1-4

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Literary Devices

Metaphor and Simile

In Aristotle’s view, metaphor is one of the highest forms of thought, allowing humans to make sense of the world by grounding abstract ideas in concrete images. Elegant metaphor, he writes, is one of the marks of the truly ingenious poet.

Perhaps he’s giving himself a little pat on the back there: Poetics is laden with metaphor and simile. One of the most persistent and important of these is the idea of the work of art as a living creature. Writing of the proper construction of an epic, Aristotle observes:

The story should, as in tragedy, be constructed dramatically, that is, based on a single action that is whole and entire and that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Only thus can epic, like a living organism, produce its own proper pleasure (47).

In this image, different kinds of poetry grow like different kinds of living creatures, with some sort of shape built right into their DNA: A daffodil should look like a daffodil, a humpback whale should look like a humpback whale, and an epic should look like an epic.

But there’s something even richer and deeper going on here. If an epic is “like a living organism,” it can “produce its own proper pleasure” for itself, not just for the people who listen to it (47). (Think of how much a dog enjoys being a dog!) It’s as if the writer is in charge of bringing up a healthy animal, whose own pleasure in life will give observers pleasure, too.

One of the roles of metaphor, then, is to suggest possibilities beyond the obvious. Aristotle’s metaphors mean Poetics still feels fresh and lively more than 2,000 years after it was written.

Analogy

Analogy is another important part of Aristotle’s persuasive toolkit. At the beginning of Poetics, he argues poetry is all about representation. Representative art comes naturally to humans—and perhaps even separates humans from other animals. Thereafter, time and again Aristotle makes analogies between different kinds of representative art—especially between staged tragedy and portrait painting. For instance, he argues:

Since tragedy is a representation of people who are better than we are, poets should copy good portrait-painters, who portray a person’s features and offer a good likeness but nonetheless make him look handsomer than he is (36).

This analogy provides a handy visual example of a more abstract concept, giving the reader a second way to understand what he means: It’s easier to envision the way people look “handsomer” in a painting than the way a whole person might be portrayed as “better” in a play. But it also helps Aristotle to make a broader point about the purpose of representative art as a whole. Suggesting both painting and tragedy should portray people as just slightly better and deeper than they really are, Aristotle makes a quiet ethical argument for the representative arts. These arts are here not just to provoke catharsis, but to steer humans toward possibilities beyond the everyday.

Rhetoric

Aristotle was one of the founders of rhetoric—that is, the art of persuasive speaking or writing. His rhetorical skill is on display in Poetics from the opening.

Consider the very first paragraph:

What is poetry, how many kinds of it are there, and what are their specific effects? That is our topic, and we will inquire how stories are to be put together to make a good poetical work, and what is the number and nature of poetry’s component parts, and raise other questions arising in the same area of inquiry. We shall make our start, as is natural, from first principles (17).

Here, Aristotle begins much as generations of writers and thinkers after him learned to begin: He lays out his subject, explains the questions he intends to answer, and prepares the reader for how he intends to answer them.

When he observes it is “natural” to begin with “first principles,” he’s making a philosophical claim: In order to understand poetry, he suggests, humans need to look right at their roots, making sure they share an understanding of what poetry even is. To say that this is “natural” also fits with his understanding of poetry as a living thing—and subtly suggests Aristotle’s way of looking at the world is right. It’s not just that he thinks people should begin an investigation this way; it’s simply the “natural” thing to do.

This logical, “natural,” roots-to-branches development of thought shapes Poetics, from discussions of whether tragedy or epic is the “higher” art to passages tracing the growth of language from phoneme to metaphor.

But Aristotle’s rhetorical brilliance isn’t only in his step-by-step approach, but in his use of vivid examples grounding his theory in reality. Again, he makes it clear he’s not just pulling arguments out of thin air but building his conclusions from real-life observation.

For instance, in a discussion of tragic versus epic structure, he observes:

one should never build a tragedy with an epic structure, that is to say, one containing more than one story. Suppose one were to make the entire story of the Iliad into one play! Epic is long enough for every episode to appear on an appropriate scale, but in a drama the result is very disappointing. […] There is even a play of Agathon’s which was a flop simply because of this (40).

Aristotle’s contemporaries might have seen poor Agathon’s “flop” themselves—but even a modern-day reader can imagine just how poorly this play went down, and maybe remember a play or movie they saw that failed in the same way. Aristotle’s theory is built on a firm real-world foundation, drawing on both reason and human experience to structure his rhetorical argument.