Bring out the salient features of Plato’s attack on poetry

ASSIGNMENT

(For July, 2015 and January, 2016 Sessions)

LITERARY CRITICISM & THEORY: MEG – 05

1.    Bring out the salient features of Plato’s attack on poetry.

Ans:

Plato, the great Greek philosopher who possesses stubborn views on art, poet and poetry unleashes a series of attacks on poetry. His views and opinions are largely mentioned in his Republic. Most of the opinions of Plato are objections to poetry. Plato definitely believed that poetry had power, and that power made people want to imitate what they saw in art. This sounds bad for him because of his metaphysical beliefs

According to Plato, the nature of universe is imitation (mimesis). He believed reality consists of various layers. The top layer is made up of ideas, and all the lower levels imitate those ideas. Plato regarded mimesis as mere representation, not expression which is creative. Plato argued that the poet who describes a chair in his poem is not true to the original. He believed in the existence of an absolute reality. It consists of ideal things, of which individual objects in this world are nothing but reflections or imitations. The painter or poet who imitates these individual objects is imitating and imitations and so producing something which is still further removed from reality. Eg: a chair exists firstly as idea, secondarily as an object of craftsmanship and thirdly as object of representation in art. Thus mimesis is thrice removed from reality.

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