ABSTRACT
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Platonists whose main concern was poetry, as writers, theorists or critics, could find encouragement and some kind of inspiration in the Ficinian doctrine of poetry as furor; but not in Plato’s own writings, nor in what they knew of the Neoplatonists, nor in the expositions and commentaries of Ficino could they find any direct help for the understanding and practice of poetry as a craft. The rules for good composition were to be found first in Horace, then, more and more as his Poetics became more widely known through sixteenth-century commentaries, in Aristotle.
