Mixed Race Divinity and Humanity
Socrates “builds up a picture of the poet as ‘a light, winged, holy creature’, who cannot compose until he is out of his mind and possessed . . . . The god takes away the poet’s senses, and uses him . . . so that the poems he utters are ‘not human and of men, but divine and of the gods’ ”. ~ Penelope Murray, Plato on Poetry, 8-9
Hyperbole is Plato’s swollen trick
While he pretends that poetry is good.
The ploy almost winning, glistening, slick,
Is glossy till the truth is understood.
He makes the overwhelming of the soul
Of poets by divinity to seem
A glorious invasion. Gods control
The poets’ minds. Divinity, extreme
In ravishment, imposes holy rape
Resulting in an offspring at best mixed
In its identity, a monstrous shape,
Both god and human. Both of them are nixed,
Though. Such miscegenation makes burlesque,
Degrading both, the two strengths turned grotesque.