Plato’s Inscription of Poetry in Law

Much like the censorship laws of 1940s Adelaide, Plato is motivated by a concern with the moral influence that poetry might have on citizens in his description of an imaginary, ideal city in the Republic. But while the Ern Malley trial fixated on the immoral content of the poems, Plato’s critique is situated at the level of poetry’s form. That’s not to say that he doesn’t disapprove of certain immoral subject matters – in Book III, he makes some remarks on what content should and shouldn’t be discussed in poems distributed throughout the populace. However, he emphasises the corrupting influence that the form or style of poetry can engender.

According to Plato, there are three styles of poetry which are differentiated according to how they employ imitation. By ‘imitation’, Plato means the perceptibility of the voice of the poet in the poem. A poem is said to be imitative when the voice of the poet is hidden. A non-imitative poem makes plain that the poet is speaking.

To explain this distinction between imitation and non-imitation, Plato refers to the beginning of Homer’s Iliad. In this section, the poet details how Chryses begs for Agamemnon to release his daughter, to no avail. Following this failure, Chryses prays against the Achaeans to the gods. Up to the lines

And he begged all the Achaeans 
but especially the two sons of Astraeus, the commanders of the army

the poet is speaking in his own voice.¹ He employs no devices to convince the reader that someone else is telling the story. But after this point, the register shifts, and the poet speaks as if he actually were Chryses himself. Here, the poet Homer is obscured. The reader is now being spoken to through the voice of the priest. This address then continues throughout. The speeches and the parts between them are both narratives. But when Homer presents a speech in the voice of someone else, this is poetry-as-imitation.

Given this understanding of imitation, the three kinds of poetry according to Plato are as follows: the first uses only imitation, and is associated with tragedies and comedies. The second has no imitation, that is, it ‘employs only narration by the poet himself’, as in a dithyramb.² The third kind uses a mixture of these registers, and is often found in epic poetry.

Plato’s theory of imitation goes beyond poetic speech. In Book X, he explains that imitation in general is to make things appear as you might by reflecting them in a mirror, without being able to make the things themselves appear. The imitator produces something which is in fact thrice removed from the thing-in-itself. Here Plato gives the example of a bed, as produced by a god, a craftsman, and a painter. The god produces the very being of the bed itself. The craftsman forges a particular iteration of the Form of the bed, which can be made in several ways. In turn, the painter models their image on the craftsman’s bed. Consider the further example of a horse’s reins and mouth bit. A painter might make an image of these objects as part of a larger scene, while a metal and leather worker make the object, and the horseman is the one who actually uses it. So, in addition to the idea of the Form of an object, a particular instance of that object, and a representation of that object, there are three subject positions. There are three ‘crafts’ and three ways of relating to each thing, ‘the one that uses it, one that makes it, and one that imitates it.’³

Crucial here is the idea that the imitator need have no actual knowledge of the thing they imitate. Plato explains, ‘… a poetic imitator uses words and phrases to paint coloured pictures of each of the crafts…’⁴ and ‘he knows nothing about that which is, but only about its appearance.’⁵

But how does imitative poetry threaten our moral being? Here is where Plato’s larger claims about Truth and the Soul become important. Because the imitator doesn’t necessarily know anything about what they imitate, they have no access to truths about the world. What they create, then, excites the part of our soul which is likewise distant from truth: that which is in us that tends toward the worst. To return to the topic of imitative poetry, specifically, then, when the poet enters into the character he is invoking, the reader takes on this subject position too. By reading imitative poetry, by taking pleasure in the imitation – or inhabiting it, it is Plato’s concern that we might ‘come to enjoy the reality.’⁶

To return briefly to the trial, consider Constable Smith’s hesitancy to admit even knowing what the word ‘incestuous’ means in his speculations about one poem: ‘The word “incestuous” I regard as being indecent, not only because it has no relation to the rest of the poem. I don’t know what incestuous means, [but] I think there is a suggestion of indecency about it.’⁷. It’s almost as if by being privy to the word, Smith would be complicit in ogling.

This is the justification for Plato’s famous ‘banishment’ of the poets from the ideal city. In his defence, Plato invokes ‘a [more] ancient quarrel between [poetry] and philosophy.’⁸ But for his part, it is only imitative poetry that he banishes from the city, not all poetry. Plato bans hoax poetry specifically.

However, in the very act of banishing the poets from the city, Plato inscribes poetry in its foundation. Firstly, he establishes imitative poetry as the polar opposite of ‘reason’, which is what he claims orders the city. So, in a very simple way, the city is tethered to poetry in the first exile it legislates. But more fundamentally than this, the devices which are used to establish poetry’s banishment rely on the techne of the imitative poet. Although Plato would have us believe that in Books III and X he proceeds by reason, and that if he employs poetics, it is dithyrambic at best, or epic at worst, the voice of Plato as orator disappears in the dialogic form precisely the way he himself condemns. As we know, even though Plato sometimes appears as a character in the dialogues, for the most part he uses Socrates and others as mouthpieces for his own views. Much has been made, for example, of what is thought to be a more accurate representation of the historical Socrates in Euthyphro, and the Socrates of Phaedo, who curiously espouses affirmative Pythagorean speculations about the nature of the soul. Something similar happens in Books III and X of the Republic, as when we read the dialogue, it is easy to forget Plato and believe we are hearing the direct speech of Socrates and Glaucon.

Furthermore, as stated in Book II, the Republic outlines an idea of a ‘just city’ in speech alone. It is categorically imitative because it is placed at a third remove from the ideal city as such. For Plato, the ideal and just city, as created by the gods or a perfect exercise in human reason, exists in the realm of the Forms. It has not been actualised in the world yet. The city as it is, with all its imperfections, can only be the work of a craftsman. Perhaps, as suggested in the later dialogue Timaeus, it was forged by a demiurge so not to rival the world of the gods in its perfection. It follows then that Socrates’ descriptive account of the city-to-come can only be that of the imitative poet. Plato’s banishment of hoax poetry methodically enshrines the imitative poet as parasite rather than casting him out as exile.

Plato readily admits the powers and the pleasures of imitative poetry, and his attempted banishment is carried out with reluctance. In his commitment to justice, Plato invites poetry back to defend itself. He writes, ‘if the poetry that aims at pleasure and imitation has any argument to bring forward that proves it ought to have a place in a well-governed city, we at least would be glad to admit it, for we are well aware of the charm it exercises.’⁹. Could the Ern Malley trial be precisely the defence which invites the poets back in? Let’s return to the courtroom in Adelaide.