Περὶ ποιητικῆς (Poetics)

Daniel Keyes has said he wrote Flowers for Algernon to test Aristotle's dictum in the Poetics that a tragic hero must fall from a height: here the height is intelligence, and the man who falls is Charlie Gordon.

The two treatises are companion pieces and each refers to the other. The Poetics analyses how tragedy produces its effect on an audience; the Rhetoric analyses how a speaker produces an effect on one. They share a vocabulary and a method, and the discussion of style and diction in the third book of the Rhetoric points back to the Poetics directly. Taken together they are the foundation of the European tradition of treating persuasion and dramatic structure as craft with describable rules, rather than as inspiration.

Oedipus Rex is Aristotle's model tragedy in the Poetics. He uses it as the best example of recognition coinciding with reversal, the messenger who comes to relieve Oedipus and instead reveals who he is, and of a plot so constructed that merely hearing it told arouses pity and fear.