Which Poets are the True Legislators of the World?

 Shelley said that Plato was a poet in the broad sense of the word. So the ironic banning of poets from the vision of the Republic is more than interesting, is it not? Socrates was put to death by democratic means. His crime? Making the polity lose faith in the gods by the public questioning of what constituted their godliness. For if the gods were merely irrationally lustful and vindictive tyrants that would punish humanity for the Promethean hubris of creativity, how could such rule over humanity? Except, perhaps, as a rotten and misbegotten oligarchy. 

So Aristophanes, the poet, in the broader sense of that term, composed a play called The Clouds ridiculing Socrates. 

Now the issue of what true poetry is, perhaps, needs to be somewhat elucidated. Many times we are told that the ironical juxtaposition of ambiguity in a strictly metered form is poetry's sine qua non. It is overwhelmingly the case that the most highly developed music imparts in the medium of sound the substance of creative problem solving as great fugal dialogue. Now much babble has been written over the centuries about "dialectics." There are "dialogues" that cannot properly be called profound ideas regarding humanity, even though they may be quite impassioned. 

A very ironic instance of this is the French decadent school of Charles Baudelaire that praised Poe as a revolutionary purveyor of the "flowers of evil." And yet, it was just the opposite. For instance Poe roundly attacked the downright criminal protégé of the romantic poet Sir Walter Scott, the so called Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. However, you have to decode Poe to realize this, like so many of his other attacks on Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, they were not outright. This is also the case in Poe's series of satires on the subversive literary circles of his day. Such as his ripostes anent the wife of Guiseppe Mazzini, Margaret Fuller and of course his many swipes at the transcendentalist followers, (Emerson Thoreau, Longfellow, et al.) of that rather vile and disgusting literati named Thomas Carlyle who penned the evil The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question. 

The idea of celebrating evil is nothing new to the generations of drugged up Thelemic rock groupies of drug fiend and Satanist  Aleister Crowley, of course. Mark Twain wrote a much overlooked such literary dialogue called The Mysterious Stranger. Now, it might be argued that Clemmons was merely referring to the Babylonian model of god as a ruthlessly punishing and irrational destroyer of his creatures. But that would be some very big stretching.

Perhaps the old saw that beauty is in the eye of the beholder should be applied just a bit more rigorously. For the luridly dramatic paintings of the murderer Caravaggio might be supposed to be beautiful given their meticulous execution, but are they really beautiful? Perhaps it is not so simple as a' that....

The Beheading of Saint John (1608) by Caravaggio (Saint John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta)