How Poetics drew on The Odyssey

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

Homer · c. 725 BCE

Aristotle · c. 335 BCE

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On Poetics’s page

The Poetics keeps reaching for one poem to make its point, and it's the Odyssey
Aristotle's theory of plot, reversal, and recognition is reverse-engineered from Homer — the bath-scene scar, the handling of improbable incident, the tight single action are his go-to illustrations
Read the Odyssey first and the Poetics stops being abstract: you've already watched the machine Aristotle is taking apart

Aristotle's working model for what a well-built epic looks like
In the Poetics, the Odyssey is the case study — its single unified action (Aristotle praises Homer for leaving out Odysseus' wound on Parnassus, his feigned madness, anything that doesn't drive the homecoming) is the textbook example of a plot done right
The scar-in-the-bath recognition becomes Aristotle's specimen of anagnorisis — the moment of knowing he'd build his whole theory of reversal and recognition around