Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for
sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it.
Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously,
Mr. Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the
continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek
thought.
The reason for the dominance of this tradition was
technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience
necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in
order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as
the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction--Mr.
Havelock shows how the Illiad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under
the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of
emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as
a series of specific images in a continued narrative.
The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an
aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece
demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence
structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be
described normatively and analytically: in short a language of
ethics and science.
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