ABSTRACT
Not every philosopher since Plato has persisted on his exclusionary task, and even his own most famous pupil, Aristotle, tried to give poets their philosophical due. It is fair to say that various versions of the Platonic and the Aristotelian stances have held sway over the centuries and continue to do so to this day. Poetry is not the place to go to if people are seeking 'information and improvement', if they wish to know of 'things as they are'. The poetic form in which the Code is set may not make its precepts more apposite, but neither do they make it less so; that is, neither do they make them wrong or false or merely 'insight' in some derogatory sense. Poetry makes salient the various potentialities of language: the phonetic, the syntactic, and the semantic. It typically makes salient the phonetic potentialities of language by means of meter, rhyme, and other rhythmic devices.
