Chapter 1 - The poetics of praise

Summary

At one point in his Poetics, Aristotle takes occasion to give a brief account of the history of Greek poetry up to the time of writing, in the fourth century bc. He distinguishes two types of poet, according to their differing characteristics. Of these, ‘the more dignified represented noble actions and those of noble men, the less serious those of low-class people; the one group produced at first invectives, the others songs praising gods and men’. This first stage was followed, says Aristotle, by the narrative poems of Homer, among which he included the comic Margites, a now lost poem about a fool-hero. The Margites belongs to the low tradition of ‘invective’, while the Iliad and Odyssey belong with ‘songs praising gods and men’. This schematic bit of literary history has failed to impress most readers of the Poetics, but it possesses a double interest for the present discussion. Aristotle sorts poems out according to a single criterion: whether they look upwards at high subjects or downwards at low ones. There is no room in his scheme for what would now seem a requisite third type, where the poet shares with his audience a horizontal view of their subject, neither up nor down. Everything falls under one or other of the two original rubrics, praise or invective.