Meaning
An outcome in which people get exactly what they deserve, with virtue rewarded and wrongdoing punished, especially when the punishment arises fittingly from the wrongdoer's own actions. Originally a term of literary criticism, it now describes real-life reversals that feel aptly deserved. Often wry or satisfied in tone; typically said of someone else's well-deserved setback. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Coined by the English critic Thomas Rymer as 'poetical justice' in his 1678 essay The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider'd, where he argued that proper tragedy should reward the good, punish the wicked and deliver an unmistakable moral - a standard he applied so strictly that he proposed improvements to Othello. John Dryden called the essay the best piece of criticism in the English tongue. The underlying idea was not new: classical writers including Horace, Plutarch and Quintilian had discussed the moral function of drama, and Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy (1595) anticipated Rymer's argument. In modern use the phrase has escaped the classroom and describes any real-life outcome that seems fittingly deserved, often with an ironic twist.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- poetic irony
- poetical justice
Usage Examples
- In a touch of poetic justice, the spammer's own server collapsed under a flood of automated replies.
- There was poetic justice in the cheat being caught by the very detection software he had helped sell.
- Critics called the collapse of the vanity project poetic justice for a studio that had ignored its writers for years.