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 engages, although it has exercised a smashing big money of influence upon subsequent literary studies and criticism. In this work Aristotle outlines and discusses many elementary 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 at bottom their works.The prefatory definition for mimesis is the act of creating an image or images in somebodys mind, through an artistic representation such as, a play, a poem, or a painting, idea or ideas that will then be assoc iated 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 lyric Ballads when he states that a poem was to chuse (sic) incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or get wind 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 eon he was away, and describing them to his sister. Wordsworth grew up around Tintern Abbey and with his belief that nature taught humans clean lessons, he was very descriptive in his run-in describing the landscape and the basic affect that it personally had upon him.Aristotle also believed that the use of simple linguistic process in the poetry wil l keep the ultimate meaning from becoming fuzzed by involved figures of speech. Wordsworth basically rejects the ideas of personification of abstract ideas (652) and poetic phraseology (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 journal 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.