Aristotle on the Art of Poetry

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. This amplified rendering of the Poetics of Aristotle, I hope, will be useful to the student of literature in general, and perhaps not without suggestiveness even to scholars in the ancient classics. Primarily, however, it is designed for certain students of English that'i meet with, who are capable of deriving profit from the substance of the treatise, but gain less on a first ac quaintance with it in any modern translation than their efforts commonly deserve. Accordingly, my chief aim has been to make the subject matter of the work as intelligible as I thought it could be made for a first perusal by a kind of reader whose difficulties and initial mistakes I have come to know as a teacher of English. To this end I have employed a number of expedients, some of which may need a word of explanation. First of all, then, the original text has here been divided and expanded.