Dr Witness Mdoka lecture notes ©2023

ENGL 3105: History and Principles of Literary Criticism

What’s the problem with poets?

Plato’s dialogue, Ion, is brief and seems to address a rather trifling question: Do poets know
what they are talking about? If Homer composed beautiful passages about chariot-driving,
does his art include technical knowledge of that skill? This is, to put it nicely, not what most
of us consider being a pressing concern. It matters though because the implications of this
short piece shed light on one of the most troubling ideas in Plato’s corpus: that the ideal city
or commonwealth should exile its poets, poetry and rhapsodes. Living in the twenty-first
century, it is hard to accept the proposal that a leader could make his citizens better people by
banning art and its performance. It is also hard to understand the idea given Plato’s deep
admiration of poets, especially Homer. Although Plato expels the poets from his ideal
commonwealth, it is clear that he does so with great pains. Therefore, what exactly is the
problem with poets/poetry?

Socrates questions the art of rhapsodes and not poets themselves. The treatise, Ion, also
addresses technical knowledge, as opposed to moral knowledge. The friendly conversation
between Socrates and Ion in Ion, is playful, though less flirty than other dialogues.

Ion is a rhapsode known for his knowledge of Homer and Socrates wants to know what sort
of knowledge this is; why, for example, does it not extend to other poets, except when they
discuss Homeric themes. What skills depicted in the Iliad and Odyssey does Ion have?
Should we allow poets and rhapsodes to lead our armies?

Especially, Ion believes that poetry involves a special knowledge and Socrates does not.
Instead, he believes that the poet is possessed, and not simply inspired by the Muse and
transmits that power to the audience. A rhapsode is further in the chain from the source – he
compares this nicely to a magnet and iron fillings – but still performs his art in an irrational
way requiring no special knowledge. Many artists would describe the movement of creation
as a sort of trance state, although very few would agree that artistry requires no technical
knowledge.

This point matters because, if poets have no special technical knowledge, they likely, are not
moral experts either. Indeed, many of Plato’s contemporaries took poets to be moral guides

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and there are still those who would like to believe that art makes us better people. In spite of
the very obvious problem that a god might act through an artist to deliver moral truth,
Socrates is making the case that seeing artists as moral experts is a dangerous delusion. They
arouse our emotions and provide us with entertainment, but ultimately, they can hardly be our
moral guides, since they are do not even know what they are doing.

This is a central idea in Plato: virtue is knowledge. We would be good if only we had the
moral knowledge to do so. But this knowledge is very hard to come by. Plato’s elitism stems
from the fact that very few people will ever achieve moral knowledge, and even Socrates dies
without ever reaching that knowledge. Therefore, the danger posed by poets is that they both
fail to make us better, and they delude us into thinking their art is moral education. For Plato,
everything comes back to education, and the reign of amateurs instead of experts –
democracy in short – prevents us from becoming the noble species we might potentially be.

In Plato’s Ion, a dialogue between Socrates and a rhapsode of that name, Socrates makes an
extraordinary claim about poetic composition, “All good epic poets,” Socrates declares,
“recite all their fine poems not by skill but because they are inspired and possessed, and the
lyric poets do likewise. Just as diviners dance when they are not in their right minds, so too
lyric poets compose their fine lyrics when they are not in their right minds. Rather, when they
enter upon their harmonies and rhythms, they revel like bacchants and are possessed, just as
bacchants draw honey and milk from rivers when they are possessed, and are not in their
right minds. The souls of lyric poets do this as well, as they themselves affirm.”

The Ion takes its point of departure from the curious fact that Ion both performs and
discourses upon the Homeric epics brilliantly, but falls asleep at the mere mention of other
good poets, such as Hesiod and Archilochus. The hypothesis of poetic possession is
introduced to explain this puzzle: whether as performer or as critic, Ion must be inspired
when it comes to Homer, like an iron ring charged by a magnet; for if it were a matter of
skill, then he should be able to recite and explain all poets alike, whether good or bad, since
they generally speak about the same kinds of things, such as wars, councils, heaven and
Hades, gods and heroes. Poets too, Socrates adds, may hit or miss, which would not be the
case if composition were a technê (skill).

In a second strand of the argument, which comes to the fore in the last third of the dialogue,
Socrates changes tactic. Instead of arguing that a specialist should be able to talk intelligently
about any product of his art, he says that if poetry, as Ion maintains, provides wisdom on all

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subjects, then the specialist in each – whether horseracing, prophecy, medicine, architecture,
or warcraft – should be best qualified to speak about how well they are represented, and not
the rhapsode, whose expertise resides in the rhapsode’s art. Here, the emphasis shifts from
the poet to what we might call the critic or interpreter; this is why Plato chose a rhapsode as
Socrates’ interlocutor rather than a poet. Socrates’ view of criticism is restricted to
explicating technical matters within a poem, in response to the assumption, evidently
plausible in antiquity, that poets were reliable founts of wisdom on everything. Now, Ion
might have answered at this point that he can lecture well on the nature of performance,
which is what the rhapsode’s art is about. Instead, however, he bows to Socrates’ conclusion
that, though he has no skilled knowledge, he can say many fine things about Homer because
he is possessed by divine dispensation.

Question for Discussion

Using Ion and Republic, defend poets and rhapsodes from being exiled from Plato’s ideal
commonwealth by invalidating Plato’s arguments for their banishment.