Quote
By Aristotle
The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.
- Source
- The Poetics of Aristotle, translated with a critical text by S. H. Butcher, 1895 · Poetics IX, 1451b, p. 33
- Read at
- Macmillan and Co., London and New York, 1895 (Butcher's translation)
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About this quote
From the Poetics, chapter 9, in S. H. Butcher's English translation (London, 1895). Aristotle is comparing the poet with the historian. The line "poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history" is another translator's wording; this is Butcher's.