Poetic Enthusiasm: The (Mis)Fortune of a Platonic Image

Traditionally, the literary image of the inspired poet has a positive connotation, right from its Homeric and Hesiodic roots: the poet receives a sort of divine investiture by virtue of which he actively acquires and shares the ability (a whole of knowledge and skills) to compose and recite songs and stories that produce in the listeners the double effect of enchantment and pleasure. The poet of tradition is therefore a divine or deified man, a “light, winged and sacred” creature, who distinguishes himself from ordinary human beings by a wisdom learned by exceptional masters: not men, but gods (this, ultimately, the sense of the adjective autodídaktos referred to Femio in the 22nd book of the Odyssey). The same vision crosses the preplatonic poetics from Hesiod to Theognis, and Pindar could not be more explicit: the poets are agathoi and sophoi by concession of the Muses. Inspiration and knowledge, natural talent and acquired ability, are like two sides of the same coin, they are not mutually exclusive, but implicate each other. The criticism of this poetic knowledge, as known, involves rhetoricians, sophists and philosophers, from Heraclitus and Theagenes of Rhegium, until the palaià diaphorá and the harsh accusations that Plato makes to Homer as the founder of a unitary and compact poetic tradition. What is perhaps less known is what happens next to the image of the inspired poet, marking the first stage of a long philosophical and literary journey that from the fourth century BC goes as far as the nineteenth-century Romanticism. The culmination of the critical operation that Plato himself ascribes to the philosophers, probably by forcing the dichotomy between them and the poets, is the new Platonic image of an inspired poet, which through the analogy of the magnet in the center of the Ion undergoes a reversal, acquiring a clear negative connotation: the enthousiasmós does not equate man to a god, but cancels his superior rational faculties so that the god can use them as a passive tool to express his own voice in the first person. The poet is éntheos no longer because he rises to divine levels, but because he literally welcomes “the god in himself”, through a movement from top to bottom and a sort of possession that can only take place if a space is freed: the god takes the place of nous. To be surprising, first and foremost from an exegetical point of view, is that this refined work of re-semantization actually represents a sensational failure. The insistence of the contemporary interpreters of the Platonic work in attributing to the central pages of the Ion a character (at least in part) laudatory of the figure of the inspired poet, is nothing more than the reflection of a long and early history of misunderstandings. In other words, that is, which results from the reading of the ancient poetic treatises following Plato, in particular the Ciceronian oration Pro Archia and the Ars poetica of Horace, is apparently an almost seamless recovery of traditional theses, recovery that would seem to ignore the Platonic intervention, as if it had not happened. Deepening the investigation, however, there is a much more disconcerting scenario: through explicit and implicit references to Plato as a poet-philosopher and to his writings as works of art, his successors attribute to him, without hesitation, exactly the same traditional image of the inspired poet that he intended to overthrow, thus making him the main promoter of its fortune over the centuries. What I propose to do is therefore: (1) to demonstrate that the Platonic interpretation of the inspired poet and the traditional one are irrefutably contrary; (2) reconstruct the stages of the (mis)fortune of the Platonic theory of poetic enthusiasm, showing that it is a story of misunderstandings; and finally (3) try to answer the question of why this long and uninterrupted chain of misunderstandings occurred, giving back to Homer and Plato their own distinct reasons.