poetical justice

Meanings

1. The idea that in a literary work such as a poem, virtue should be rewarded and vice punished.
2. Synonym of poetic justice (“the fact of someone experiencing what they deserve for their actions, especially when this happens in an ironic manner”).

Etymology

From 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.