Aristotle Poetics

Aristotle, Poetics, ed., Francis Fergusson, trans., and introduction by S. H. Butcher (New York Hill and Wang, 1961). 

Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, p. 1479. 

Aristotle. Poetics. Edited and translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe. Loeb Classical Library. London William Heinemann, 1973. 

Part of J. C. Scahger s Poetics," which had a striking influence on Ben Jonson, has been translated into English by F. M. Padelford (118). An autographed manuscript of his commentaries on Aristotle s De Historia Animakum was bequeathed to the University of Leyden by Joseph Scaliger, who requested in his will that the wax portrait of his father be put in a safe place where it cannot be handled and damaged by too much contact., (108). 

In The Poetics, his great manual on how to write a play, the philosopher Aristotle said, "Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity. The cause of this again is that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general."3... 

In his treatise known as the Poetics, Aristotle defines dramatic action as "the movement of spirit or psyche that produces a character s behavior." Film and theatre director Elia Kazan, in his notebook for A Streetcar Named Desire, remarks that "finally directing consists of turning psychology into behavior." Substitute the word "screenwriting" for the word "directing," and Kazan s statement would still hold true. A character s desires or needs, that movement of the psyche to which both Aristotle and Kazan refer, can be expressed only by his or her behavior. The accomplished screenwriter selects those few details, out of all that come to mind, that will best describe the essence of the... 

Dramatic action, or "movement of spirit," as Aristotle defines it in the Poetics, is the life force, the heartbeat, of any screenplay.2 Psyche, the word he uses for spirit, meant both "mind" and "soul" to the ancient Greeks—the inner energy that fuels human thoughts and feelings, the underlying force that motivates us. 

Although little is known about Kyd s classical scholarship, it is striking that he translated the Padre di Pamiglia (1588) by Torquato Tasso, one of the Italian writers whose literary criticism responded to Aristotle s Poetics, and the tragedy Cornelie (1593-4), a Senecan closet drama by the classicising Erench author Robert Gamier. 

Aristotle s Poetics, trans. Leon Golden (Tallahassee, FL University Presses of Florida, 1981), pp. 10, 44, respectively. 

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