![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Imitative Art of Poetry
Overview:
Plato mentored Aristotle, but their philosophies on art slightly diverge. Plato observes that the imitative arts have the greatest capacity to lie, and therefore all imitative art must be carefully measured. The greatest imitative arts are the closest to reality, and the truest depictions of what they imitate. According to Aristotle, though, the greatest art finishes what nature cannot finish, and perfects reality, thus reaching beyond nature into the good or the idea, which is more pure than the material physical. In both cases the ideal pre-exists the art.
Book X | The Republic | Plato
“All poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.”
“There are many ways in which the feat might be quickly and easily accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round—you would soon enough make the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants and all other things of which we were just now speaking… and the painter too is, as I conceive, just such another—a creator of appearances, is he not?”
“The tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.” “So, when we hear persons saying that the tragedians, and Homer, who is at their head, know all the arts and all things human, virtue as well as vice, and divine things too, for that the good poet cannot compose well unless he knows his subject, and that he who has not this knowledge can never be a poet, we ought to consider wether here also there may not be a similar illusion.”( Read more... )
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}