ABSTRACT

This chapter describes Plato's hostility to mimetic poetry and its possible corrupting effects, alongside Samuel Taylor Coleridge's comparable hostility to a similar phenomenon in his own time. It discusses the Neoplatonic defence of mimetic art as imitating the Ideas rather than objects of sense-perception. The chapter explores this defence through Plotinus and Schelling, assimilating it to his own experience of the struggle involved in poetic composition. It provides Coleridge's suggestive thoughts on the question of divine inspiration, in his case in a Christian context. When Socrates banishes the poets from his ideal state, he proposes to justify the measure by telling poetry that there is an Ancient Quarrel between it and philosophy. The chapter also explores the similarity between Plato's and Coleridge's concern with the difficult task of rationally validating inspired utterance, to endorse poetry through philosophy. If inspiration is to be recuperated rationally it must be by a process of after-reflection that would be better denoted 'philosophical' than 'poetic'.