What and Wherefore Is Poetry?
Plato believed that poems were lies, and there was no place for poets in Plato’s Republic. To him, poets were unreliable, substituting dreamlike visions for the true essences of the world that a responsible philosopher should seek. If the only authentic beauty is the truth found in nature, he asked, then what use is man-made beauty, fabrications loaded down with fantasies and lies? Ever since Plato laid down this challenge, the critical theorists in this course have striven to prove that poetry is more than pretty phrases, that it has the power to instruct and improve its reader: • Aristotle argued that the sufferings of the tragic hero in Greek drama arouse in us a cathartic surge of terror and pity, even as his fate teaches us moral lessons. • Longinus introduced the idea of the poetic sublime. Unlike rhetoric, which merely persuades, the sublime overwhelms its audience, literally carrying the audience away to a higher realm of experience. What Makes a Poet? Most of the thinkers in t
