Poetic justice
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- For the 1993 film, see Poetic Justice.
Poetic justice is a term referring to idealised justice.
The term was invented by critic Thomas Rymer in The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered to describe how virtue should be rewarded and evil punished in literature. Justice by poets.
Today it is often used in an ironic context, where the punishment is intimately related to the persons crime or misdeed.
In Stephen King's "Survivor Type" a doctor with no morals or conscience is shipwrecked on an island. He has a valise of heroin with him. When he breaks his ankle he uses the heroin for an anasthetic and cuts off his own foot, and then eats it. He continues to cut off body parts to fend off starvation, finally cutting off his left hand. The diary he keeps ends there.
It is poetic justice that he has the means and skills to inflict such horrendous suffering upon himself after a lifetime of harming others.
The Inferno portion of Dante's Divine Comedy reads like a compendium of examples of poetic justice.