'The first claim of the Poetics on our attention is that it is the earliest surviving treatise to record and distinguish systematically one poetic “kind” from another,' says the author. If there is first claim, should there not be a second claim? Identify it.
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
The first claim of the Poetics on our attention, long before we come to the problematic passages, is that it is the earliest surviving treatise to record and distinguish systematically one poetic “kind” from another. In doing this, Aristotle was describing as he knew it in Greece where poets usually competed for prizes in this or that class or “kind”. We know that his Politics was founded on the study, in detail, of the history and constitutions of 158 Greek states, and there is a good reason to believe that the Poetics was preceded by a similar examination of Greek plays; we have to remember the number, richness and variety of the plays available to Aristotle, compared with the minute proportion of Greek plays that have survived to us. He took over the kinds of literature as he found them; and by perpetuating them left a framework of reference for all European criticism ever since.
For it is largely through Poetics, though not because of it, that the main poetic “kinds” are still distinguished, even in their very names, through all the literatures of Europe, as Tragedy, Comedy, Epic and Lyric. In the main European languages these words are taken over from Greek merely transliterated and adapted to the appropriate grammatical shape. Whatever later forms, or kinds, may have been since developed, these have persisted, and (what is more) these names are still in constant use in the critical judgement even of kinds of literature that were unknown to Aristotle. Thus, a medieval verse Romance can hardly be discussed without reference to, and comparison with, Epic; even if the reason for mentioning Epic is to point the differences. A modern fictional narrative in prose, usually in this country called a “novel” (from the Italian), but in French called a roman (with a throwback to medieval Romance)—even a novel can hardly be discussed without using the terms Tragedy, Comedy, Epic and Lyrics—or the adjectives derived from them—as the quickest means of suggesting its character, or certain qualities in its various parts, or some aspect of its purposes or treatment. Even in a state of European literature in which the “kinds” are not strictly adhered to, the traditional kinds as distinguished by Aristotle still have vitality in helping an author to define his own purposes and methods, and in helping a critic to interpret them.
Also, quite apart from these words, which have been transliterated into the European languages, nearly all the leading critical ideas and distinctions used by Aristotle have been translated and still have a vital currency. Confining ourselves to dramatic criticism only, consider merely the terms plot, character, complication, denouement, episode, chorus, unity of action (to go no further), and ask how criticism could proceed without them. One of the main reasons why the Poetics should be read at the very beginning of a university course in literature is that it shows these essential current terms in their earliest formal context, related to a literature that one can read, at least in translation.
That word ‘related’ is very important. It is a means of accustoming oneself from the beginning to the fact that critical terms are relative, not absolute; that they need examination (not only in Aristotle but always, everywhere) in the light of the literature to which they refer and of the special purposes for which the critic himself is using them. This is just as true of modern criticism now—even of book-reviews in the weekly press—as it is of Aristotle himself, or, say, of Sidney or Dryden. Even though the words may remain in constant use in the same language, unchanged in form, yet their exact reference to the literature, and the nuance which they imply to the mind of the critic who uses them, may change, and frequently do change. The language of criticism is not a permanent, fixed, scientific vocabulary which, when once learnt, has merely to be correctly applied. It is constantly shifting; and it is the business of a trained mind, in writing or thinking of literature, to be alert to its shifts when they appear in the works of others, and to use the terms themselves carefully and studiously, in order that, so far as may be, the resulting criticism may make apparent the sense in which its own terminology is to be understood. That is the ideal; even if it is an ideal which scarcely any critic has ever attained.