Aristotle · Poet.

Poetics

Aristotle on poetry and tragedy — the founding work of literary theory.

This edition presents the original Greek (Kassel (OCT, 1966)) side by side with English translations (W. H. Fyfe, S. H. Butcher) — with click-to-parse morphology, dictionary entries, and exact Bekker citation. 26 chapters.

Read this work

• Fyfe Greek & English · W. H. Fyfe (Loeb, 1932)
• Butcher Greek & English · S. H. Butcher (Macmillan, 1895)

Greek text & translations

Greek: R. Kassel, ed. Aristotelis de arte poetica liber. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965; repr. 1968 [of 1966 corr. edn.].
Translations: W. H. Fyfe (Loeb, 1932); S. H. Butcher (Macmillan, 1895).
Full source and licence details are on the Texts & Licences page.

In print

Modern, copyright-protected translations and commentaries we can’t host here, for readers who want to go further:

• TranslationAnthony Kenny, Poetics (Oxford World’s Classics, 2013) Find in print →
• TranslationHippocrates G. Apostle, Elizabeth A. Dobbs & Morris A. Parslow, Aristotle’s Poetics (The Peripatetic Press, 1990) Find in print →
• TranslationC. D. C. Reeve, trans., in Aristotle: The Complete Works, 2 vols. (Hackett, 2024) Find in print →
• CommentaryStephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (University of North Carolina Press, 1987) Find in print →

Prefer a paper copy? These in-print editions carry the translation read here (or a revision of it):

• In printAristotle, Poetics, Loeb Classical Library 199 (Harvard University Press) — the print edition of the translation read here Find in print →

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