Plato And Socrates Poetry Analysis

Plato’s and Socrates’ Views on Poetry
Pspa 216
Dr George Bitar Ghanem

By: Hadi Alawieh
Introduction
In this paper, I’ll be stating what Plato and Socrates think about poetry according to their writings, then I’ll criticize them and give my own opinion about this topic.
Plato’s view on poetry
Plato criticized poetry at many instance especially in his book “The Republic” and in an expanded manner in “The Laws”. His views are often misunderstood due to consideration of just a part of his writings, trying to make them fit what is commonly assumed to be his philosophy. He declares that in his “noble state”, poetry should be strictly censored because it fools us with imitations (illusions), and nurtures savagery in us to the point of making it

His new perspective used morality as a ground very similar to what Plato adopts. This new claim is thought to be due to a change in Plato’s mind that is probably the result of his doubt in Socrates’ claim of divine poetry. At the end, Socrates didn’t only read poetry, but he also wrote some while awaiting his execution which shows that he was still attached to this

These poets focus only on our materialistic aspect and weaken our reason to make us passive receivers that are easily manipulated by emotions and passions. Plato is right that the existence of these types is dangerous and if not harmful, they’re at best not useful so it’s better to stop them. On the other hand we shouldn’t generalize this and look at all poets as fantasy pursuers. Many poets compose brilliant poems that enclose deep ideas and thoughts. Some are, like Socrates argues, shallow people that don’t realize the profound meanings of what they say, but definitely not all of them are like so. Generalization is an erroneous path many fall in. It’s wrong to make an assumption about all poets based only on the portion we’ve seen. Poetry is an effective tool that has high educational capacities. For kids and even for adults, it is a tool that sharpens their imagination, memory, creativity, empathy, innovation, presentation and communication skills, language skills (grammar, employ figures of speech…) which also benefits their intellectual abilities of figuring out the author’s intentions by figures of speech, and their ability to recognize rhythms and express themselves thus relieving their pain and making them feel better, in addition to motivating and inspiring whether being readers or writers of poems,