A Response to Plato, who Bans the Poets

Dear Plato,

Beauty is the beginning…

Sometimes, I wonder about beauty. Beauty must be what God is, what heaven will be to our senses. Different people perceive beauty differently, but for me, the most profound occurs in chiaroscuro–the interplay of shadow and light. I thrill at the moment dissonance blooms into harmony. Chills whisper down my spine.

It is the irregularities of a face that make it interesting.

I suppose the root of it is really that I can’t abide blandness. True beauty is baroque: a twisting, anguished distortion on the side of a white pearl. The pearl looks like a different thing from every angle that you view it, and if you move it under fluorescent light, its color changes from what it seemed to be on the veranda in the rain.

This hunger for imperfect art is ultimately egotistic, or at least humanistic. If every man has the same potential of humanness, each man is the same Aeolian harp with the same number of strings, its tune plucked by the whim of the wind. The vast array of differences is happenstance; we are all the same flawed pearl, viewed in a million different settings from a million different angles. As a harp, some may go their entire lives only having played on three of twelve strings. As a pearl, some are displayed to themselves and others from a plain side. The core that unifies us all is not some bland substratum but an almost unlimited potential to speak, to act, to create – such a vast and varied and self-contradictory potential that none of us can embody all of it. Trying to impose pristine order on this chaos is bull-headed, stubborn, adorably human, and completely futile. The chaos is the essence of our beauty.

Of course, you might see humans differently. But observe the rest of my argument through this lens.

on to Language… 

Reflecting our twisted natures, language is not founded on the limited ground of dry syllogism but in poetry’s verdant, unholy swamp of unbridled imagination and illogical association. As Shelley writes:

“Language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.”

Language is founded on intuition. In retrospect, and after undergoing the refinements of time and civilizations, it can be studied, analyzed, and described in grammatical terms – but language was not manufactured like a clock. It grew like a tree. The metaphor fails here because from the tree grew clocks. Starting with concrete images, people were able to climb to abstract concepts, or “family resemblances,” words that unify images into something that transcends each individual picture. In this way, humans reached abstraction. Thoughts, expressed most clearly in words, are the reason we are higher than beasts on your Chain of Being.

and now, to Poetry…

You believed that for each type of physical thing, there exists a corresponding Form, from which the physical thing participates in. I would argue to you that poetry is the closest we get to a manifestation of the Form of the Forms. That which is common to all the forms – divinity – is distilled in poetry, which rains down smaller stanzas of the Poem that exists only in the place where time is forever complete.

One might argue that law could accomplish the same thing. Shelley and I would ague that while law is corruptible, poetry is never wrong. Law is subject to be abused because it is used. Poetry is not used. It simply is, and its beauty is apparent:

“Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change … its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life.”

“Bad poem” is an oxymoron – any writing that fails to meet the standard poetry sets is not poetry. An audience may admire its form, or imagery, or parts of its dissected body, but someone who desires to be taught by Truth will love a poem in its whole, for itself, not just its individual parts. When it is read as a whole, it is known, loved, and improves the man. Unlike the law, which is ruled by its few legislators, poetry is ruled by each person who reads it. It is a living, breathing thing delivered into the hands of individuals. It can be twisted and mutilated by those in power, but the poem itself is innocent. Don’t ban poets; ban kings.

Beyond that, poetry creates the experience of transcendence. Reason can only reach into knowledge and desire. Poetry looks beyond into the places most people can’t see. It sees past the pragmatic, plastic blue mass of the sky into the forever of the starry darkness. It stares at things beyond man, beyond the self. It banishes man in glorification of more-than-man:

“… it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.”

One reaches this appreciation of poetry by cultivating two things: imagination (ability to color ideas with a new tint) and sensitivity of soul (ability to empathize with the writer, understand his heart, emotions, and state of mind.) You had these, Plato. You were a poet, in the truest sense of the word.

Then Why Aren’t Poets Exemplary Humans?

Poetry in particular, because it captures the human experience, justifies all human experiences! The poet need not feel the weight of responsibility, because every evil is not evil but only another harpstring heard – and the music of human experience is the sweetest he could desire. He tints thoughts with his own and scorns reason for the unknown, following Lucifer, his father, the beautiful angel who loved to see and illuminate and who sought to be greater than God.

The experience of producing distilled divinity feeds an addiction to a libertine life by removing some of the despair and self-hatred people would otherwise suffer from living in spiritual bankruptcy. It allows poets to tell themselves that no matter what horrible things they do, when they write, they are gods. They glean working material from the sex, drugs, and drinking, trying to escape the deleterious cognitive consequences that follow by placing value in their production of poetry– a vicious cycle.

Interestingly, Shelley seems to think the poet is customarily stable and virtuous, almost to the point where he is his poem. Only in moments of inspiration does he go mad and “become a man” – but when he does, he “becomes a man” so intensely that he murders and rapes and destroys in grand sins rather than despising and lusting as normal men do. This is a very convenient interpretation for Shelley, who is, of course, a poet, and besides that, admires epic heroes intensely. Better to be the glorious wreck of Achilles than a downtrodden degenerate. According to Shelley here, the poet must live like his protagonists.

He seems to speak from experience. He is a man who committed unspeakable acts under intense emotion– and then probably hated himself afterwards with just as much intensity. He could see it. He knew. I got such chills reading this, as if a ghost had risen up from the past and, looking past me into his own age, declared those words in innocent remark; then turning, returned to his desk and continued his studies, nibbling on his pen. He had no inkling that he would die at the age of thirty in a shipwreck off the Gulf of Spezia.

Poets Awake!
Shelley ends “A Defense of Poetry” with a call to action by pointing out the fecundity of revolutionary and unstable times:

“At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.”

Our time is now! Poets awake. String your rusted harps, and clear your throats. You may speak like a beggar and dress like one too, you may be blind, but the spirit soon will claim you and make you a trumpet for change. He will seize you, sit on the throne of your soul, and burn in your words.  You are a chosen man, an Ancient Mariner, a Peter, a Samson, an Israel – the lowest of the low, the weakest of the weak, a clay vessel for the strongest of the strong, the liquor that will drive nations mad until their bloodshot eyes see reason and order returns. And just as the lowest men make the highest things, so may the lowest age sing a message to the highest by creating the highest age. All time is redeemable. The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. All reason is erasable. And perhaps, some day, these broken vessels of clay will be united in something beyond their will, a great Imagination that will make all things beautiful. For now, the dying swan sings the most beautiful song, and all things are broken in fragments. We see in poetry as in a broken mirror, one bit of the whole that shall be revealed when time comes to its completeness and the ages can be traced to the source of their spring.

Will you reconsider the blueprint of your Republic, Plato? We would so hate to be excluded.

Love,

Amelia and P. Shelley

Cited: “A Defense of Poetry” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry)