Epic vs tragedy: which is higher?

The question of whether epic or tragic imitation is the higher form is raised at the end. The objection to tragedy is practical: it requires excessive gestural performance from the actors — it appeals to a cruder audience and therefore demands a cruder art. Aristotle's response is direct: this objection is against the histrionic art, not the poetic. The same excess of gesture may occur in epic recitation; the fault lies in the performer, not in the form. On the page, without performance, the question of which form is higher depends on the forms themselves, not on their typical modes of presentation.

Tragedy is superior for several reasons. First, it has all the elements of epic — it can even use the epic meter — and in addition has music and spectacular effects, which produce the most vivid pleasures. Second, it achieves its vividness in reading as well as in performance. Third, it requires less extent of reading or hearing to attain its end: the unity and concentration of tragedy give it an advantage that epic cannot match. A work that is more concentrated can produce a more unified impression, and a more unified impression is a higher achievement.

Fourth and most fundamentally: each art ought to produce not any chance pleasure but the pleasure proper to its kind. Tragedy's pleasure is the specific pleasure of pity and fear resolved through catharsis; epic's pleasure is a broader, less specific pleasure. If tragedy achieves its specific pleasure more fully than epic achieves its specific pleasure — because tragedy is more unified, more concentrated, and produces a more complete cathartic effect — then tragedy is the superior form. This is Aristotle's conclusion.

The Poetics ends with this verdict. Whatever its subsequent readers have made of it — and many have disagreed, writing epic rather than tragedy as the higher form — the framework within which the disagreement happens is Aristotle's. The question of which form best achieves the pleasure proper to its kind is the one he taught us to ask.