How Poetics drew on Oedipus Rex

A documented line of influence: Aristotle demonstrably engaged Sophocles’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.

Sophocles · c. 429 BCE

Aristotle · c. 335 BCE

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On Poetics’s page

The Poetics keeps naming one play as the model: Oedipus Rex. Aristotle's whole theory of plot (Ch. 13–16) is reverse-engineered from how Sophocles built it
His prized device — peripeteia and anagnorisis arriving in the same stroke — is simply a description of Oedipus discovering the truth about himself
Read the play first and the Poetics stops being abstract: you'll recognize the exact scenes Aristotle is theorizing from

When Aristotle defines the perfect tragedy in the Poetics, Oedipus Rex is the play he reaches for again and again as his example
Its great hinge — the moment recognition and reversal strike at once, as Oedipus learns who he is and is destroyed by knowing — is Aristotle's textbook case of ideal plot construction (Ch. 11)
Sophocles wrote the drama; Aristotle, a generation later, turned it into the standard every tragedy after would be measured against