ABSTRACT
When Plato says that the writing of poetry is a kind of madness or that it is inspired, one of his points is probably to deny that it is anything like a skill, or an accomplishment. This seems to have been part of his objection to the Sophists as teachers of rhetoric. (Rhetoric was speech-making rather than poetry, but many of the same objections would hold. On certain subjects, anyway, such as love, ‘inspiration’ may be needed for a prose discourse as well as for a poem.) The idea that there is a certain technique that you can master, and then write poetry, is what Plato rejects.
