Imitation

In the Poetics, Aristotle thinks that the essence of art is imitation. Imitation distinguished art from academic classification. I found that he really emphasizes on imitation, which fires my interesting because I have never thought imitation would be so useful and important.

But exactly, the origin of art is imitation. When I started drawing, professor told me to draw a box, an animal skull, then the paintings of artists, and tried to learn from their works. Same with composing. Composers start from analysing other composers' songs, and then they find what they like the most, and try to compose by themselves. After a period, they find their own styles.

Aristotle thinks that artists make the reality more beautiful or more ugly when they display their works, and art or poem imitates things of past, now or future(people believe what will happen), and art should imitates the general or typical characters or events. He thinks that the duty of poet is not to describe what happened, but what is going to happen according to law.

I think poet is more philosophic than history because it usually focus on the universal but representative things to achieve the truth. So, imitation in poem is kind of creative, and art is a process from material to performance. This theory is totally different from Plato's thought that the object of imitation is the realm of senses. I'm definitely support Aristotle, because he made me realize that art can not only perform the reality, but even more real than history.