Etymology

poetic justice

po·et·ic jus·tice

Today it means: Synonym of poetical justice (“the idea that in a literary work such as a poem, virtue should be rewarded and vice punished”). Full definition →

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The story

From poetic + justice, a variant of poetical justice, coined by the English literary critic Thomas Rymer (c. 1643 – 1713) in the work The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d and Examin’d (1678): see the quotation.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.