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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: ever in repose and cannot easily be displayed, especially to a mixed
multitude who have no experience of her. Thus the poet is like the painter
in two ways: first he paints an inferior degree of truth, and secondly, he
is concerned with an inferior part of the soul. He indulges the feelings,
while he enfeebles the reason; and we refuse to allow him to have authority
over the mind of man; for he has no measure of greater and less, and is a
maker of images and very far gone from truth.
But we have not yet mentioned the heaviest count in the indictment--the
power which poetry has of injuriously exciting the feelings. When we hear
some passage in which a hero laments his sufferings at tedious length, you
know that we sympathize with him and praise the poet; and yet in our own
The Republic |
