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[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. Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and epic.
Leonardo Bruni's translation of Aristotle's Poetics. Poetics is the study or theory of poetry, specifically the study or theory of device, structure, form, type, and effect with regards to poetry, [1] though usage of the term can also refer to literature broadly.
In his work Poetics, Aristotle defines an epic as one of the forms of poetry, contrasted with lyric poetry and drama (in the form of tragedy and comedy). [12] Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of meter and is narrative in form.
A significant example of epideictic writing in Chinese poetry is the fu rhapsody that developed in the early Han dynasty. This highly ornamented style was used for almost any subject imaginable, and often incorporated obscure language with extensive cataloguing of rare items, all in verse of varying rhyme and line length. [10]
Aristotle taught that tragedy is composed of six elements: plot-structure, character, style, thought, spectacle, and lyric poetry. [157] The characters in a tragedy are merely a means of driving the story; and the plot, not the characters, is the chief focus of tragedy.
Despite the name, the lyric poetry in this general meaning was divided in four genres, two of which were not accompanied by cithara, but by flute. These two latter genres were elegiac poetry and iambic poetry. Both were written in the Ionic dialect. Elegiac poems were written in elegiac couplets and iambic poems were written in iambic trimeter.
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In classical rhetoric and poetic theory, decorum designates the appropriateness of style to subject. Both Aristotle (in, for example, his Poetics) and Horace (in his Ars Poetica) discussed the importance of appropriate style in epic, tragedy, comedy, etc. Horace says, for example: "A comic subject is not susceptible of treatment in a tragic style, and similarly the banquet of Thyestes cannot ...