Poetics

One of the most famous and influential ideas in Poetics is catharsis: the emotional release provoked by an artistic experience. While the term is now more generally used, Aristotle envisions it as specifically to do with tragedy, and even more specifically to do with the release of two emotions: pity and fear. Pity, he says, comes from sympathy for a character’s sufferings; fear comes from the uneasy sense that what happened to a character could as well happen to the reader. Tragedy provides a safe outlet for these feelings, and even a “purification of such emotions”—a transformative release (23).

Catharsis, then, is related to Aristotle’s larger point about mimetic representation. Experiencing a tragedy is about recognizing a correspondence between what happens on stage, what happens in the world, and what happens within us—an emotional movement that’s perhaps reflected in the form that Aristotle describes, in which a terrible recognition is an indispensable part of the tragic form. Catharsis itself is a mirroring.

Much of Poetics treats poetry as a living entity. Discussing the role of the plausible and the possible, Aristotle refers to how they fit into “[t]he needs of poetry,” as if poetry had its own desires and hungers (53).