ABSTRACT
Plato accuses poetry of perverting its audience. Poetry is essentially suited to the representation of inferior characters and vulgar subjects. The whole issue of the sense of Plato's charges against poetry and of their contemporary importance depends just on this idea. The Platonic argument seems plausible in the case of children because many of us think that, unclear about the difference between them, children often treat representations simply as parts of and not also as symbols for reality. The metaphysics of Pygmalion is still in the centre of the thinking about the arts. An extraordinary, almost hysterical version of such a view, but nevertheless a version that is uncannily close to Plato's attitude that the lowest part of the soul is the subject-matter of poetry, is given by Jerry Mander. Mander duplicates, in connection with television, Plato's view that poetry directly influences the life for the worse: "We slowly evolve into the images we carry, we become what we see".
