Influence of Aristotle’s Poetics on William Wordsworth’s Poetry and William Shakespeare’s Plays :: Aristotle Tragedy Tragedies

The Influence of Aristotle on William Wordsworths Poetry and William Shakespeares PlaysAristotles Poetics is not one of his major fly the coops, although it has exercised a slap-up make do of influence upon subsequent literary studies and criticism. In this work Aristotle outlines and discusses many grassroots elements that an author should adhere to in order to write a great tragedies and/or poetry. Two important topics that Aristotle addresses and believes to be crucial to the art work is the mimesis, or imitation of life, and that the audience has an emotional response from the work, or a catharsis. Both William Wordsworth and William Shakespeare were believers in Aristotles philosophy concerning tragedies and poetry, and employed these two elements in spite of appearance their works.The underlying definition for mimesis is the act of creating an image or images in someones mind, through an artistic representation such as, a play, a poem, or a painting, idea or ideas that wi ll then be associated with past experiences. Aristotle is concerned with the artists ability to have a significant impact on others. First though the idea or belief that the artistic representation should be occurrences that people could relate to, or experiences that they would be familiar with. William Wordsworth intentions were made clear in the Preface to musical Ballads when he states that a poem was to chuse (sic) incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or exposit them (650) This mimesis can be seen throughout Wordsworth poem Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth is reflecting upon his memories of the effect that Tintern Abbey had on him art object he was away, and describing them to his sister. Wordsworth grew up around Tintern Abbey and with his belief that nature taught humans honourable lessons, he was very descriptive in his oral communication describing the landscape and the basic affect that it personally had upon him.Aristotle also believed that the use of si mple words in the poetry will keep the ultimate meaning from becoming fuzzy by composite figures of speech. Wordsworth basically rejects the ideas of personification of abstract ideas (652) and poetic expression (653) in The Preface to Lyrical Ballads, because his main goal is to imitate the language that the common men speak everyday. Wordsworths Tintern Abbey is written in ledger style, which is not known for loftiness in speech or complicated language, but for an easy flowing style which employs common everyday language and description. This allows the audience to understand and develop a picture of the image in their mind.