We might begin by noting that the treatment of poetry as a branch of
history or culture is based on the assumption that the poetry of a period is
a reliable index to that period’s larger intellectual and ideological currents.
Beckett’s Endgame, for example, testi¤es to the meaninglessness and horror
of a post-Auschwitz, nuclear world. But as critics from Aristotle to Adorno
have understood, the theory that imaginative writing is an index to its time
ignores what is speci¤c to a work of art, along with its powers of invention,
transformation, and resistance. This is Aristotle’s point in the ninth chapter
of the Poetics:
The difference between a historian and poet is not that one writes in
prose and the other in verse.... The real difference is this, that one tells
what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason po-
etry is something more philosophical and serious (kai philosophoteron
kai spoudaioteron) than history, because poetry tends to give general
truths while history gives particular facts.
By a “general truth” I mean the sort of thing that a certain type of
man will do or say either probably or necessarily.... A “particular
fact” is what Alcibiades did or what was done to him.
It is clear, then... that the poet must be a “maker” (poietes) not of
verses but of stories, since he is a poet in virtue of his “representation,”
and what he represents is action. (#1451b)^14The meaning of the possible (“what might happen”) is made clearer by Aris-
totle’s response to Plato’s complaint that poets are dangerous to the state be-
cause they tell lies. “The standard of what is correct,” writes Aristotle, “is not
the same in the art of poetry as it is in the art of social conduct or any other
art.... It is less of an error not to know that a female stag has no horns than
to make a picture that is unrecognizable” (#1461).
But of course Plato understood this distinction perfectly. The danger of
poetry to the ideal republic, after all, is in direct proportion to its power, its
charm, its magic: “We will beg Homer and other poets not to be angry if we
cancel those and all similar passages [e.g., “false” stories about the gods], not
that they are not poetic and pleasing to most hearers, but because the more
poetic they are the less are they suited to the ears of boys and men who are
destined to be free.”^15 One could hardly endow the poetic with more power.
And indeed, when in Book X of the Republic Plato takes up the ancient
“quarrel between philosophy and poetry” so as to dismiss the latter from the
well-governed state, he admits that “we ourselves are very conscious of her
spell,” “her magic.” That magic reappears at the conclusion of the Republic
10 Chapter 1