This book contains the celebrated Butcher translation of Aristotle's Poetics, faced, page by page, with the complete Greek text (as reconstructed by Mr. Butcher from Greek, Latin and Arabic manuscripts). The editor's 300-page exposition and interpretation follows. In his classic commentary, Butcher discusses with insight, sympathy and great learning Aristotle's ideas and their importance in the history of thought and literature. His scholarly remarks cover art and nature, imitation as an aesthetic term, poetic truth, pleasure as the end of fine art, art and morality, the function of tragedy, the dramatic unities, the ideal tragic hero, plot and character, comedy, and poetic universality. A new 35-page introductory essay, Aristotelian literary criticism, by John Gassner, discusses the validity of Aristotle's ideas today and their application to contemporary literature.--From publisher description.