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Reading Poetics, it very quickly becomes apparent to anyone familiar with narrative structure that this book was highly influential throughout the ages. We continue to dissect narratives exactly as laid out in this book, and I would say that for someone wanting to better understand "the rules" of a proper narrative there is no better place to start than this book. Although Aristotle is dealing mostly with Tragedy and Epic poetry many of these ideas are universal and can be used as a reference to most narrative forms more broadly.

This was my first dive into Aristotle, and I feel that it was a good place to start. It was short and easy to understand. I only wish that I had read more of the works that he is referring to. Especially Sophocles' Oedipus Rex as it is referred to the most often aside from Homer's works.

What I found most intriguing was the differences between Aristotle and Plato on this subject. For Plato, art is an imitation of an imitation (reality the imitation of the world of forms and art the imitation of reality) which removes art more distantly than reality from the truth. Aristotle seems to be saying something quite different in Poetics. That poetry and what we can take to infer more broadly as art in general is a “basic human, and therefore universal, experience.�� Aristotle claims that poetry "...is a more philosophical and higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.�� These views contrast most heavily in whether or not we can use art to understand truth. On a moral level, Plato and Aristotle are again in opposition. Plato as evidenced in both The Ion and The Republic adheres to a view that art should be useful and helpful to a society. That distasteful artforms could potentially be harmful to a society by stirring emotions that could be detrimental to the society at large. Whereas Aristotle thinks that the distasteful artforms (those that stir up emotions of hatred, vengeance, lust, etc.) are helpful to a society as a sort of venting mechanism.