Dear students: Extracts of Aristotle's Poetics is attached for your Midterm Exam. Best! Linghua Chen Attachment: Aristotle’s Poetics IV. Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for “harmony” and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry. V. Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type—not, however, in the full sense of the world bad, the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain. --

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