Mostly skimmed the Introduction, carefully read the translation of the Poetics and the subsequent commentary. Aristotle's text itself is short and unsurprisingly quite excellent, there's a lot to be learned from it; the commentary taught me to hate the author (Halliwell, not Aristotle).

What's remarkable about the Poetics, what makes it so important, is that it is basically the first (?) emergence of a modern philosophy of art: indeed, it is the emergence of the concept of "art" as such. There is a companion volume by the same author titled "The Aesthetics of Mimesis," whose chapter five, "Inside and Outside the Work of Art: Aristotelian Mimesis Reevaluated," contains the provocative point that the term used for art, "techne," was used by Plato to refer to artistic production as we understand it, but also to craft production. This is the basis for Plato banishing the poetics from the Republic: poetry, "fiction," because it is imaginative, does not satisfy the needs of truth. Aristotle is the one who makes a distinction between the "fine" arts, and crafts, the former not being truth-apt in the same sense as other modes of discourse or productive activity. That means that Aristotle's Poetics is a distinctly "modern" aesthetic philosophy---it's freaking relevant!!!

Mimesis is the key concept that Aristotle uses to create a division within techne between fine arts and the crafts. Art is mimetic, in the sense of representational or, controversially, "imitative." It represents things as they could be, should be, or as they were. It is projective, and therein lies the "knowledge" of art (Aristotle says that art is closer to philosophy than history in virtue of being speculative). Mimesis, then, is THE fundamental concept of art: it is what defines art as such. What's absolutely nuts about this is that Aristotle applies it to ALL MEDIA, INCLUDING MUSIC!!!! Music is non-representational?!? What music "represents," or the features of the world that music is "after," in the pattern of, is ethical character: through its affective quality, music has an ethically representative quality. I personally found this very very interesting, and still more relevant to modernism / abstract, non-representational art: abstract expressionism, suprematism, whatever, it's all mimetic in the sense of modeling ethical character. Wow!Aristotle develops this distinction within poetry between dramatic and narrative modalities. He says that tragedy is dramatic, and epic is narrative. My personal pet theory that I think may be original (it's not in any of the commentary) is that this refers to grammatical persons, first versus third person. The dramatic mode comes from theatrical performance, obviously: the actors embody their characters. There is no narrative mediation---third person, where the narration presents itself. By contrast, the narrative mode is the telling of a story---first person, mediated by the narrating "I." Homer¸ unique genius who breaks all the rules, combines the modes in his work, having characters act out but occasionally interjecting in the voice of the poet.My conclusion from this is that tragedy is properly going to be in third-person, and epic is going to be in the first-person. Honestly, from the perspective of a writer, I think the Poetics is full of little hacks like that. For example, the poet's art is, in its truest form, the construction of plot-structures, and NOT the construction of verses / sentences!!! Fuck you, Raymond Carver!!! The tragic hero is, properly, an everyman with one flaw, or who is fallible in some critical way. Everything after act 1 is technically the denoument. Both epic and tragedy should begin in media res. Tragedy is better than epic.As for the translator / author of the commentary, Halliwell, my first indication that he is not to be trusted came when he did a big SKIP on the concept of katharsis. Did you know that the proper function of art is to invoke fear and trembling, and subsequently katharsis? But of course Halliwell very conspicuously glosses over the concept of catharsis. I lost trust in him at that point and noticed that a lot of the shit he's saying was stupid and annoying. Even from my perspective as a humble layman, I felt like he was skipping one of the most fundamental parts of the text.Anyway, the Poetics is great, the first text of modern philosophy of art. Now I'm moving on to Hegel.