The poetry of so and so

I never get the get the feeling that Plato's 100% serious, especially about banning poetry, that instead he actually wants poets to be poets, poets who are willing to be poets and to practice poetry instead of posing as poets; that Plato wants poets to be people first and devoted first to trying to bring out what's good in themselves and then to their poetry, not pretending that just by making poetry a poet is becoming a better person.

I do get the feeling that poetry was very important to Plato and therefore to ancient Greece, that, in the time before Plato, poetry was the voice of the world-view which was mythological and that Plato was the voice of the transition from the mythological world and the world we're still living in today, the classical world.

The feelings I get from reading Plato's recommendation to ban poets are feelings of exaggeration and disappointment, of one who's seeing something fishy going on in what one considers serious and over-reacts for the purpose of drawing attention to the seriousness of the situation, at a literary level wherein all literature can be read as satire, no longer pretending to be the voice of gods and goddesses, the voice of the divine.

And so Plato is disappointed in the product and wants especially to protect the young from it, fearing, as Sally King notes, that the unconscious of young impressionable minds will be "invaded by other people's minds" and so the unconscious will no longer be "ours." That is, that one coming under the influence of a poet who hasn't first brought out the best in him or herself has much less of a chance to become themself and no chance at alll of becoming a real poet.

I can see the great poetry in Plato's injunction! It's sublime, in the way all great poetry is. How rare a real poetic voice is. When I actually hear one I can understand why so many poets can look so important and meaningful one moment and so empty the next, and why these poets tend to huddle in groups so as to protect their importance from people like Plato.

Yesterday I tried to read a poet I used to read. I won't say his name, not because I'm afraid but because he's still alive and it wouldn't be kind to say his name. He once seemed so important to me, such a great poet, but reading him yesterday was far worse that I thought, at best not very good and at worst the worst poetry can be.

Where's Plato when we need Plato, to ban poetry for awhile to see what would happen if poetry was banned. Was I the only one who could see that the poet I was trying to read would certainly be exiled to a small village on the Black Sea where only poets live and where a statue of Ovid had been erected.