Literary Criticism (short history)

*Tragedy and Comedy: The internal focus

Poets have a strong tendency to form opinions about their craft and to use these opinions as part of their messages of their poems.
There are many ways for expressing these messages. Here in this book, I have read two ways, Comedy and Tragedy.
*Comedy is away in which poets transfer messages while making the readers laugh.
*Tragedy is away in which poets express their opinions while making the readers sad or even making them cry.
Before reading this book, I thought that when the language of your poems is comedy, it means you should talk about interesting and funny subjects and when it is tragedy, it means you should talk about disappointing subjects. But in this book I understood one of the best and effective way of talking about disappointing subjects is comedy, cause while the poet makes people laugh ,he/she makes them understand their problems in an indirect way which is much effective but tragedy makes people sad and directly asks them to solve their problems.
After reading some parts of this book, I understood that Plato and Aristotle had ideas about poetry so I decided to study their ideas about poetry (tragedy and Comedy……)

Plato's opinion about poetry

He is a moral critic. He rejects art and literature because he is moralist .He believes poet is a holy thing, it is winged. Poet is like a prophet, poem should be inspired by God. There is no invention in him until he loses his sanity, he can do nothing unless he is inspired. He says poetry is not some thing you can learn, it is not rational. It is not conscious so there is no logic behind it .therefore it can not be trusted. There can be truth behind poetry but it must be examined .even the poet does not understand his poetry because it is the result of moment of irrational within the poet. Plato is idealist .the world of reality is just an imitation of ideal world .he says, beauty, goodness is just a copy from an ideal world. Poetry is the copy of the copy so it is twice copied of ideal. It shows that the poet has no knowledge of ideal and the poet lack of useful purpose .Plato says there are 3 art related to every thing. One is
1. How to make s.th
2. How to use s.th
3. How to imitate s.th
So a carpenter is superior than a poet .the third one is the lowest art and this art belongs to poets and painters .poet just imitate the surface of reality .there was no imagination in Plato's world. Now I am comparing my ideas about poetry with Plato's and I am going to go through it deeply so I will let you know in my notebook.



BY: Zahra Hatami