The study of Poetics has now become a unique, I would say, branch of science with its specialized workers. On the one hand, Aristotelians do not engage deeply with this text, and on the other hand, its scholars have, until today at least, followed the interpretative tradition of the Renaissance, which sought answers to issues of art and literature through the 'Poetics' - and secondarily the 'Rhetoric' - placing Aristotle's work in its service rather than illuminating its internal relationship with it.
The 'Poetics' constitutes a distinct work, but it remains organically connected to the others, as a product of the same mind and from its own subject, the 'biology' of mimetic art as poetics. The bibliography of thousands of titles, which continues to expand at an accelerating pace, creates new issues and demands from today's researcher a long-term engagement, which does not encourage the broadening of their horizons. It is unnecessary to emphasize that, as usual, a small number of publications are worthy of note and that those capable of speaking on their own about this Aristotelian riddle can literally be counted on one's fingers globally.
If one adds to these difficulties the problematic to desperate state of the manuscript tradition of the text and its telegram-like character, one will have a sufficiency, but not a complete image of the struggle that is called 'Poetics'. It will be complemented as long as one does not forget that, since 1498 when it was first published in the West, this work has been constantly utilized to support, directly or indirectly, almost every aesthetic theory, as a theory of form.
The study of Aristotelian 'Poetics' was not dictated by the ambition to be included in the honorary guard of its distinguished commentaries, but by the strategic purpose of my entire work: to approach well-read and decisive texts for the intellectual history of the West and to seek where the reading has been misleading, even in its fertility, in order to identify hidden, yet indelible organic ties between pre-Christian and Christian Hellenism, which will allow us to approach the classics through the shortest - direct - path of our medieval and modern spiritual tradition, to the extent that this too draws from the inexhaustible sources baptized in the gospel of the new life in Christ.
I consider the emancipation of the interpreter from the seemingly self-evident prejudices of modern times a necessary condition for understanding the 'Poetics'. The title 'Mimesis' against form responds to this request, given that the adventure of 'Poetics' ultimately owes itself to a systematic projection of Aristotelian mimesis onto the aesthetics of form, an aesthetics I would call dominant, if not exclusive, in the contemporary Western world.
Only in this way is the concluding chapter of the book legitimized - 'From tragic mimesis to the Divine Liturgy'. I do not try to take from foreign scholars our Ancients - the classics belong to those who love and study them - I try to read them in their Greek light, which has been suffocated for centuries in evening clouds. The wise and laborious study of the texts is a precious possession, but it cannot alone transform a spirit of life so different from that which gave birth to and nurtured the works of the Ancients.
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