Studying Aristotle’s “Poetics” — Part 3: Medium, Objects, Manner

As I’ve been interviewing screenwriters, I typically ask what some of their influences are. One book title comes up over and over again: Aristotle’s “Poetics.” I confess I’ve never read the entire thing, only bits and pieces. So I thought, why not do a daily series to provide a structure to compel me to go through it. That way we’d all benefit from the process.

For background on Aristotle, you can go here to see an article on him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

To download “Poetics,” you can go here.

Part 3: Medium, Objects, Manner

There is still a third difference- the manner in which each of these
objects may be imitated. For the medium being the same, and the objects
the same, the poet may imitate by narration- in which case he can
either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own
person, unchanged- or he may present all his characters as living
and moving before us.

These, then, as we said at the beginning, are the three differences
which distinguish artistic imitation- the medium, the objects, and
the manner. So that from one point of view, Sophocles is an imitator
of the same kind as Homer- for both imitate higher types of character;
from another point of view, of the same kind as Aristophanes- for…