Poetics: Most influential book on poetry ever written

The Poetics is much better known than the Rhetoric, though only the first book of the former, a treatment of epic and tragic poetry, survives. The book aims, among other things, to answer Plato’s criticisms of representative art. A penetrating, near-contemporary account of Greek tragedy, it demonstrates how the elements of plot, character and spectacle combine to produce ‘pity and fear’, and why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. It introduces the crucial concepts of m...