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Full Idea
If you strip a poet's works of their musical colorings and take them by themselves, I think you know what they look like. …We say that a maker of an image - an imitator - knows nothing about that which is but only about its appearance.
Gist of Idea
Without the surface decoration, poetry shows only appearances and nothing of what is real
Source
Plato (The Republic [c.374 BCE], 601a)
Book Ref
Plato: 'Complete Works', ed/tr. Cooper,John M. [Hackett 1997], p.1205
A Reaction
Knowing the appearances well is more than most people can manage, and aspirations to know the true reality may be an idle dream. Poets are, I presume, welcome in the Cave.
| 16565 | Without the surface decoration, poetry shows only appearances and nothing of what is real [Plato] |
| 16566 | Poetry is more philosophic than history, as it concerns universals, not particulars [Aristotle] |
| 20873 | Tragedies are versified sufferings of people impressed by externals [Epictetus] |
| 23364 | Homer wrote to show that the most blessed men can be ruined by poor judgement [Epictetus] |
| 22030 | For poets free choice is supreme [Schlegel,F] |
| 22341 | Literature is the most important aspect of culture, because it teaches understanding of living [Murdoch] |
| 21939 | The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 9814 | All great poetry is engaged in rivalry with mathematics [Badiou] |
| 21007 | Storytelling is never neutral; some features of the world must be emphasised [Nussbaum] |
| 20454 | Wallace Stevens is the greatest philosophical poet of the twentieth century in English [Critchley] |
| 20927 | The hermeneutic circle is between the reader's self-understanding, and the world of the text [Zimmermann,J] |