What is beauty? Think about this for a moment...
It is not something big? It is not something small? According to Aristotle beauty needs to have a certain magnitude to be considered beautiful. If it is too big, your eye cannot take it all in; if it is too small, you cannot see the beauty at all. Well, what is a normal sized form of beauty then?
I don't know if I agree with this too well. At first, when Aristotle wrote, "Hence a very small animal cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused..." I thought he was talking about beauty being bigger and more visual, until he said, "Nor, again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once..."
I don't agree with this. The smallest poem could mean the world to a person and be the most beautiful poem they have ever read. A statue could be so huge and dominant, that it makes you appreciate it for it's beautiful characteristics. The statue could be ugly, but you still find beauty in it. As the saying goes, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." How is Aristotle going to tells us what can be beautiful and what cannot. Everyone has their own interpretation of beauty; it could be an object that is very small, or an object that is very large. Whatever it may be, there could always be beauty there in the eyes of some person, regardless of it's size.
Also, he talks about how poetry is imitated, but it does not matter (unlike Plato, who thinks it is worthless). There is a quote that stood out to me--"...he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are actions." This is the quote that reminded me of Plato's ideas in a way.
Aristotle must like the idea of writing because he brings up ideas on how a tragedy should be written: what the plot should include and how the characters should be, and how the author should write the piece.
One quote that stood out to me was, "The fourth point is consistency: for though the subject of the imitation, who suggested the type, be inconsistent, still he must be consistently inconsistent. It takes a while to get this, but it makes sense if you think about it.
Make sure if you ever write a tragedy, not to use unusual words, mean words, or rare words--you may be criticized by Aristotle.
Aristotle also talks about what strikes humans as pitiful, and that is what should be included in the plot (he gave the example of a brother killing a brother, rather than an enemy killing an enemy). He expands so much on how a tragedy should be written, that I don't understand how he can say it is imitation. Of course they write about something that happened (this would be imitation), but what about the writers who made up their own stories, such as Shakespeare. These stories were not imitated, but would Plato and Aristotle still consider him an imitator?
Posted by Anne Stadler at February 16, 2005 10:22 PM | TrackBack