Classic Philosophical Questions - Essay Example

The fact is that he must have had some literary antecedence because even some of his philosophical works are dialogic, quite like those which would often be encountered in drama (Gould & Mulvaney 412)

Yet he considered poets to be a great threat. This might not be unconnected to the fact that he feels that what poets and other members of the arts community produce are rather too powerful to go uncensored. He insists that art is never original; it is always a copy of the copy (Pearson 414). As a result of his belief that art is powerful enough to stir anyone emotionally and otherwise, he advocated for measures to be put in place to check its effects, the negative ones for the most part. Worse still, the poet like every other person in the art, is capable of creating copy – that appears at times to be more original than that the original – that cannot be found in the ordinary world.

Speaking well about Homer; it's a divine power that moves you, as a "Magnetic" stone moves iron rings. (That's what Euripides called it; most people call it "Heraclian.") This stone not only pulls those rings, if they're iron, it also puts power in those rings-so that there's sometimes a very long chain of iron pieces and rings hanging from one another. And the power in all of them depends on this stone. In the same way, the Muse makes some people inspired by herself, and then through those who are inspired a chain of other enthusiasts is derived.

You know, none of the epic poets, if they're good, are masters of their subject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all those beautiful poems. (Leitch et al 41) During the period when Plato wrote, it was not unusual for philosophers to think that poets got their inspiration from sources other than them. Many often attributed it to a divine source. More so, whenever poets and writers generally are asked how they achieved their feats, they at time do not know how they were able to pull it through without the aid of a force outside them.

Although Plato did not seem to be so much agree with notion of divine inspiration, he may not be categorically said to have opposed this position. Kennedy (1989 p. 108) states: The poet has a skill all his own: not understanding, but capturing the appearance, the look and feel of human life. But just as an image is, or rather should be (in Plato's view), for the sake of its original, the art of image-making is destined to be the helpmate of the art that seeks truth. Poetry cannot, so to speak, be trusted on its own, but as the ward of a philosophic guardian can put its talent to good use According to Plato, the words of poets inspire because the poets has the capacity, not to only draw on images that have their originality in the world of forms, but to also create theirs.

In creating theirs, it is either they clarify have people ought to know or they further becloud what people already know. Chiefly because the inspiration for the works of poets is quite unconventional, they have so much power on their readers that the readers are at times moved to do things they would not normally do. For example, one reads “Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot (Kermode 34), one would not only be engulfed in what he talks about, one may also want to bring some of what he talks about to fruition in reality.

The kind of knowledge possessed by poets is such that could pose a lot of threat to the entire community. It has to be categorically stated that poets have the knowledge that cannot be sourced from the present world. This is another reason readers are often engrossed in what they have written in spite of the belief held by that poets are imitators of imitations.