Page 12 - GALIET THE TORCH, THE GODDESS: On Poesy Plato IV

Indeed, we can only imagine and understand how profound his heartache must have been to seriously consider either banishing poets (Homer and Hesiod and the Tragedians and the like) or having them heavily censored for their misrepresentation of the truth of human nature and of human affairs in the same manner that Plato, too, perplexingly, has censored himself from appearing in his dialogues. Understandably, he hides his philosophy in myriad dialogues.
It is evident that, as a result of Athens’ decay, Plato is afraid of, or perhaps, even obsessed with contact, transgression that he chooses and expects others to reject their own physical appetites and desires for he, in his tripartite division of the soul, has ranked them as irrational. Likewise, Socrates realizes that the poets present a threat to his ideal Republic for, in representing “reality”, they represent the irrational, the emotional and the sacrilegious:
“Because I think we’ll say that what poets and prose-writers tell us about the most important matters concerning human beings is bad. They say that many unjust people are happy and many just ones wretched, that injustice is profitable if it escapes detection, and that justice is another’s good but one’s own loss. I think we’ll prohibit these stories and order the poets to compose the opposite kind of poetry and tell the opposite kind of tales” (392b)
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