by phillipw | Jul 19, 2020 | GA, LE, PO, SO
The Triune Potency According to Penelope Murray, “Socrates . . . . says, ‘any story or poem . . . narrates things past, present or future’ ”. ~ Plato on Poetry, 4 We want a poem that is full of now, And past, and future, full. We want intense Severity of...
by phillipw | Jul 17, 2020 | LI, PL, SO, XA
The Ion, the Phaedrus, the Republic When someone else is all mixed up, we tend To sneer at what they have to say, so why Not Plato? Must we allow him to bend And contradict his arguments? Is high Philosophy supposed to work like that? He has the voices in two...
by phillipw | Jul 16, 2020 | CO, GO, JA, ME, OD, PE, SA, SO, WI
The Big Exceptions The women move in caged in places both In life and plays. In poetry they are Curtailed to Sappho and Corinna. Troth Constricts Penelope. It hems. No spar To take her seas away, she sits at loom, Is trapped at night unpicking her trapped work,...
by phillipw | Jul 16, 2020 | PL, SO
Stabbing in the Cave-like Dark before There Were Laboratories or Electron Microscopes, Plato Presumed that There Are Souls and that They Grow. How Very Poetic. “Halliwell claims that Socrates’ remarks about poetry early and late in the Republic differ because the...
by phillipw | Jul 16, 2020 | PH, PO, SA, SO
Socrates versus Sappho One wonders if poor Socrates might just Have been much happier if he had made Up poems, not philosophy. A gust Of inspiration from Apollo swayed The poets into rhapsody of thrill. While lost in love for some young person’s hair, The writers...
by phillipw | Jul 16, 2020 | DI, IN, PH, PL, PO, SO, TI
Spells and the Thoughts of Tiresias “Halliwell’s basic argument is that Socrates admits the Book X arguments to be insecure and open to defeat. He calls them ‘spells’ rather than philosophical knowledge, and he asserts that he must use them [those arguments]...
