Poetic Justice was a term coined by Thomas Rymer, an English critic of the
later seventeenth century, to signify the distribution, at the end of a literary
work, of earthly rewards and punishments in proportion to the virtue or vice of the various characters.
Rymer's view was that a poem (in a sense that includes dramatic tragedy) is an ideal realm of its own, and should be governed by ideal principles of decorum and morality and not by the random way things often work out in the real world.
No important critics or literary writers since Rymer's day have acceded, in any but a highly qualified way, to his rigid recommendation of poetic justice; it would, for example, destroy the possibility of tragic suffering, which exceeds what the protagonist has deserved because of his or her tragic flaw.
Comments