Complete Poems

Learned men, otherwise sharp, cultured, and refined.
What am I to say? Is each man's own dread desire his God?

On the poets ejected from the republic by Plato.

It is a wonder if Homer does not undermine the very precepts he established
For poets, by mingling in ridiculous things.
The fabrications of evils which he attributes to the Gods:
The deeds of the throng of heroes, smeared with foul madness:
Any one of these outweighs all those merits
By which he seeks the first crown with praise.
Whence it happens that Plato banishes him, driven from his wondrous city.
Yet the same man who says that exile is owed to all poets
Under this law, let him be exiled for himself, since
He was the author of no contemptible poem, and what
He added—that he is an imitator, and nothing more—he therefore
Condemns what depends on hanging forms. Then
Does he not attack himself? Tell me now: is it not the case that what he himself
Sets forth in various characters in prose
Freed from law, is all of this imitation, a fiction? For they say
That hardly one word in many thousands
That he posited, issued from Socratic depths.
Whence it happens that Aristotle prefers to grant these Socratic
Dialogues the title of true poetry,
Rather than what Parmenides or Empedocles wrote:
Whom he deems versifiers instead. Add
That those whom the crowd circulates under the name of wise men,
Those seven, and many others, issued laws in verse.
Thus the entire republic stands upon poetry.
Indeed, the power of the heavens, law, rule, motion,
Consensus (for concert), is nothing other than
Harmony, and rhythm, and the appearance, and color of poetry.
But if, detesting figments from a lying mouth,
And foul adulteries, he complains of stains in illicit discrimination:
Then let him [do the same] for the records of wicked histories