Poetics

In Book III Plato defines poetry as a type of narrative which takes one of three forms: the "simple," the "imitative" (mimetic), or any mix of the two.

The Arabic translation departed widely in vocabulary from the original Poetics and it initiated a misinterpretation of Aristotelian thought that continued through the Middle Ages.

Thanks first of all to Giovanni Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (1360), the literate elite gained a rich understanding of metaphorical and figurative tropes.

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.

There followed an ever-expanding corpus of texts on poetics in the later fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth, a phenomenon that began in Italy and spread to Spain, England, and France.

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.

[8] My program then was named "Theory of Literary Forms" — a title that I supposed to be less ambiguous for minds a little distant from this specialty, if it is one, than its (for me) synonym Poetics.T.