Aristotle's Poetics: Catharsis and Tragic Form

Aristotle's Poetics (Peri Poietikes), composed around 335-323 BCE while he taught at the Lyceum in Athens, survives only in an incomplete state: the transmitted Greek text covers epic and tragedy, but the promised second book, on comedy and on the iambic and its relation to invective, is lost, known to later tradition chiefly through indirect testimony such as the so-called Tractatus Coislinianus. In chapter 6, Aristotle offers his celebrated definition: tragedy is "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete in itself, and of a certain magnitude... through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation (catharsis) of these emotions." This single sentence packs together tragedy's object of imitation (a serious, complete action), its means (dramatic enactment rather than narration), and its characteristic emotional and structural effect, catharsis, which Aristotle treats as the defining goal against which any given tragedy's success can be measured.