Page 12 - GALIET THE BEAUTIFUL FORMS PLATO IV++

Not far off from Dante, tenderly holding Plotinus’s and Shelley’s hands, we shall journey back through timelines to dare correct Plato: “perhaps only the poet sings of the place beyond heaven with praises enough.”33 Shelley not only sings of Plato’s heaven, but he sublimates it with praises enough, because he is able to perceive the Forms not intellectually, but via his senses and sensibility, and via his most glorious intuition and inner vision, which is his imagination. In this sense, Shelley’s notion of poetry is not only a mirror that beautifies, but also grasps the essence and sameness of the eternal, beautiful Ideas, the things in themselves, the Beautiful, really Beautiful in itself, by the loveliness of sensory perceptions and the imagination’s wondrous poetic inner vision.
33 This form of singing is just as inspired, and intuitive as the breath of the Muses, and it leads poets to grasp and see the Forms as mediators between gods and humans. This form of singing negates poetry as a merely didactic tool to educate the lowly, ignorant masses incapable of understanding philosophical discourse. It also denies compelling poets to create the stories demanded by philosophers and the state to encourage temperate, pious, and courageous actions. Plato. Republic. 378e. Laws 660a, 840b and Republic 379a, 392b, Laws 660a. See also: Compendia. Brandwood, Leonardo. A Word Index to Plato. Leeds: W.S. Maney & Son, Limited, 1976.
• 12 •