Poetics (Aristotle)

[3]: ix  In this text, Aristotle offers an account of ποιητική, which refers to poetry, and more literally, "the poetic art", deriving from the term for "poet; author; maker", ποιητής.

The genres all share the function of mimesis, or imitation of life, but differ in three ways that Aristotle describes: The surviving book of Poetics is primarily concerned with drama; the analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion.

The text was restored to the West in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by Averroes.

[13] Aristotle distinguishes between the genres of "poetry" in three ways: Having examined briefly the field of "poetry" in general, Aristotle proceeds to his definition of tragedy: Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements [used] separately in the [various] parts [of the play] and [represented] by people acting and not by narration, accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.

[c] 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.

[10] Giorgio Valla's 1498 Latin translation of Aristotle's text (the first to be published) was included with the 1508 Aldine printing of the Greek original as part of an anthology of Rhetores graeci.

By the early decades of the sixteenth century, vernacular versions of Aristotle's Poetics appeared, culminating in Lodovico Castelvetro's Italian editions of 1570 and 1576.