The Poetics, Politics, and Rhetoric are Aristotle's aesthetic works. For a long period, the Western world was unaware of the Poetics. Only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version published by Averroes was the text returned to the West in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

The original text of the Poetics was split in two at some point during antiquity, each "book" inscribed on a separate roll of papyrus. [nine] Only the first portion, which deals with tragedy and epic (as a quasi-dramatic art, as defined in Ch 23), has survived. The second half, which was never completed, dealt with humour.

The Tractatus coislinianus, according to some academics, summarises the contents of the lost second volume.