ials for imitation? Whereas the wise and calm
temperament, being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or to
appreciate when imitated, especially at a public festival when a
promiscuous crowd is assembled in a theatre. For the feeling
represented is one to which they are strangers.

Certainly.

Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature
made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the principle in
the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is
easily imitated?

Clearly.

And now we may fairly take him and place him by the side of the
painter, for he is like him in two ways: first, inasmuch as his
creations have an inferior degree of truth--in this, I say, he is like
him; and he is also like him in being concerned with an inferior part
of the soul; and therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him
into a well-ordered State, because he awakens and nourishes and
strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason. As in a city when the
evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the
way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants
an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has
no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one
time great and at another small-he is a manufacturer of images and is
very far removed from the truth.

Exactly.

But we have not yet brought forward the heaviest count in our
accusation:--the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and
there are very few who are not harmed), is surely an awful thing?

Yes, certainly, if the effect is what you say.

Hear and judge: The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a
passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some
pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or
weeping, and smiting his breast--the best of us, you know, delight in
giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the
poet who stirs our feelings most.

Yes, of course I know.

But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that
we pride ourselves on the opposite quality--we would fain be quiet and
patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in
the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.

Very true, he said.

Now can we be right in praising and admiring another who is doing that
which any one of us