SOURCE: "The Poetic of Aristotle," in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic, Peter Smith, 1959, pp. 132-66.

In the following essay, Baldwin offers a general overview of Aristotle's Poetics, discussing in particular the role of imitation in Aristotle's poetic theory.

Veneration of Aristotle has been impatiently classed with "other mediæval superstitions," both by those who disliked authority and by those who revolted against the inlaying and overlaying of his text with centuries of interpretations.¹ Since the Renaissance the Poetic has, indeed, fared in this regard somewhat as the Bible; and in both cases those deviations from the original intention are widest, perhaps, which have arisen from "private interpretation," from missionary zeal more anxious to read into the text than to read in it. What may be called on the other hand communal interpretation, the consentient application of Aristotle's ideas to the typical problems of a whole group or period, constitutes...