The text of the Poetics I have translated is that presented in the Oxford Classical Texts series, edited by Rudolf Kassel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). In some places where Kassel marks a lacuna or obelizes a passage I have accepted the conjectures of other scholars.
In translation I have not attempted to reproduce the order of words or clauses in the Greek manuscripts, or the punctuation of the OCT editor. I have aimed to produce clear and readable English that preserves Aristotle’s sense, rather than to achieve word-for-word correspondence with the original. The decisions I made about the translation of key words in the vocabulary are recorded in the Glossary.
The numbering system, with references such as 1214a1, is that nowadays universally adopted: it derives from Immanuel Bekker’s 1831 Berlin edition of Aristotle’s works. The marginal numbers correspond to those of the Greek text, so that occasionally in the translation the correspondence is not exact. I have also noted the division into chapters in the Bekker text, which does not always correspond to the division into sections which seemed most appropriate in the translation.
The passages from Plato’s Republic are taken from the translation by D. A. Russell in the Oxford World’s Classics volume Classical Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1989), and reprinted by permission. They are also numbered, as is standard practice, in accordance with the pagination of the sixteenth-century Stephanus edition, with letters to mark subdivisions of the pages.
Sidney’s Apology for Poetry was published in 1595 in two editions. One, by Ponsonby, was entitled The Defence of Poesy; it is the other, by Olney, that is reproduced here.
Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, though written in 1821, was first published in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, edited by Shelley’s widow.
‘Aristotle on Detective Fiction’ was a lecture delivered by Dorothy L. Sayers in Oxford on 5 March 1935, first published in 1936 and later reprinted in Unpopular Opinions (London: Gollancz, 1946). It is here reprinted by kind permission of the estate of Dorothy L. Sayers.
I am greatly indebted to previous translators into English of the Poetics and I found particularly helpful the works of Ingram Bywater, Malcolm Heath, Stephen Halliwell, and Margaret Hubbard. For comments on, and amendments to, my own translation I owe a great debt of gratitude to Jill Paton Walsh and to my wife Nancy Kenny.