Between History and Poetry

Abstract

History and poetry share both aesthetics and subjects, and this can especially be seen in the example of epic and in verse drama about history, as in the works of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Samuel Daniel. The history play, as the instance of Shakespeare and Schiller attest, is an example of the mixture of the two. This historical dramatic poetry combines the work of the poet and the historian, as Aristotle defined them, the one able to arrange events to the best poetic effect and the other constrained by the sequence of events. As Socrates and Plato were less sympathetic to poetry and much less interested in history than Aristotle was, philosophy became the leading way to find truth and knowledge in the universals of reality. But Homer did not go away so readily.