Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 23

-
After giving important points related to the language and words of poetry, Aristotle gives his views on epic poetry, The structure of an epic should be similar to that of a drama. It should have a proper beginning, middle and an end. The fable of an epic must be one complete whole and the parts of it should be related to one another, only then a person would get its proper pleasure. One must not think that the epic is a representation of a historical event and so it has to cover all the incidents which took place at that time irrespective of their relation between one another. For example, the naval battle at Salamis and the fight with the Cathaginians in the Sicily happened at the same time. However they did not contributed to the same end. Many times things happen one after the other but they are not related to each other. This is where various poets miss the plot. In this particular context Homer again stands out as the inspired one. Although the Trojan war was a single event in the History but still Homer did not deal with the entire event of the war in his poem. If he had included everything related to the war then his poem would have become incredibly long. If he had somehow tried to limit the events of the war and present them in his poem then the structure of the poem would have become confusing and haphazard. So what Homer did was, he selected a particular part of the war and presented it in his poem and the other important events were described by him in the form of episodes. Most of the other poets in their work used to describe a single man or a particular event or a certain period. Such were the authors of ‘Cypria’ and ‘The Little Iliad’. The result is that the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’ have the theme of one tragedy or maximum two tragedies while ‘Cypria’ furnishes the theme for many tragedies and there are more than eight tragedies in the ‘Little Iliad’ - ‘Award of the Arms’, ‘Philoctetes’, ‘Neoptolemus’, ‘Eurypylus’, ‘Odysseus the beggar’, ‘Laconian Women’, ‘Fall of Troy’, and ‘Departure of the Fleet’.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 24

-
Aristotle continues to give important points related to epic poetry. He says that just like tragedy, epic is also of various kinds such as simple, complex, that which depend upon character, and that which depends upon suffering. Other then this, the epic and tragedy are similar in the sense that both have the same constituent elements except for song and spectacle. There is also reversal, recognition, and suffering in the epic. The thought and diction of the tragedy must also be good. Homer had excelled in these two in his ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’. The ‘Iliad’ is a story of suffering and is simple in structure while the ‘Odyssey’ is complex in structure because it has scenes of recognition and is based on character. The epic differs form a tragedy in length and meter . The proper length of a literary genre should be such that it’s beginning and end could be viewed as a complete whole. The poets of the present should try to compose poems which are limited in size. The epic, according t...
Read more

Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 26

-
Aristotle in the final chapter of The Poetics has compared the epic form of poetry and tragedy. He analyses which is the greater between the two. If the greater form of art is that which is the less vulgar one and if the greater form of art pleases the specific kind of audience then the art which appeals to every one is the vulgar one. And in fact, the performers tend to bring various unnecessary movements on the stage as if they would not be identified if they do not perform such actions. Bad flute players twist and twirl, if they have to represent ‘the quoit-throw’, or hustle the Corpyhaeus when they perform the ‘Scylla’. Tragedy is said to have the same defects. It could be compared to what the older actors said of the later ones; for, Myniscus used to call Callipides, ‘the ape’, because he over acted. The same view was presented for Pindarus. Thus tragedy is related to the epic art just as the later actors are related to the older ones. Thus the epic poetry is the higher form of p...
Read more

Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 20

-
Language viewed as a whole consists of the following parts - letter, syllable, connecting word, noun, verb, inflection or case and phrase or sentence. A letter is an indivisible sound but not any sound without intelligence. It is true that animals also utter indivisible sound but that sound cannot be called letter. These indivisible sound can be vowel, semi vowel or mute. A vowel has an audible sound which does not need the contact of the two organs of speech to be produced. A semi vowel such as s or r has an audible which needs this contact. The audible sound produced by a semi vowel is because of this contact. A mute even with the aid of this contact is not able to produce an audible sound, it needs to be combined with letters that possess some sort of sound such as g and d. The letters have different types of sounds depending upon the shape of the mouth while they are spoken and also on the places from where they originate, as aspirated or not aspirated, as short or long, as acute,...
Read more