It is hardly possible to read Aristotle’s Poetics today without acknowledging the influence of its reception history: our understanding of Aristotle’s poetical theory has been reshaped in past decades thanks to a reappraisal of long-held prejudices, whose history may be no less fascinating to explore than the text of the Poetics itself. To grasp what the Poetics has to say therefore involves questioning what its many readers have been looking after: What was the Poetics used for? And what are we using it for now? Into which bodies of texts has it been incorporated and put into perspective? How have these uses and contexts influenced past readings of the Poetics, and how do they still inform the way we read it?