The City that Expelled the Poets
Notes on the experience of reading Plato's Republic for the first time
Two years ago I read my first philosophy book, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), a dramatic reflection on Western culture's estrangement from its spiritual roots in which he presented the duality between Apollonian (rational, aesthetic impulse) and Dionysian (emotional, chaotic impulse). Nietzsche argued, rather passionately, that since the 5th century BCE, Western intellectual culture has persistently leaned toward Apollonian rationalism at the expense of the Dionysian—an asymmetry from which it has never fully recovered, and the main culprit was Plato.
There are countless reasons to read Plato’s works, and given the canonical status of something like The Republic, I hardly need to enumerate them or persuade you of their importance. And yet, if I had to give you a reason to read this book despite all the criticisms I'm about to make, it would be this: whether you agree with what Plato wrote or not, The Republic (and philosophy in general) teaches you how to think better than anything else; this reading experience was a great exercise in critical thinking because I had to make an effort to contemplate the arguments presented and explain to myself why they made sense to me or not.
So at the beginning of 2025, I approached Plato as part of my long-term project to read all the major philosophers of Western literature; I also had this romantic vision of finding some kind of foundation of wisdom in this book. However, once I finished The Republic, I ended up sympathising with Nietzsche’s indignation when he claimed that the rise of Greek philosophy marked the death of Greek drama and all its artistic mysticisms.
Plato’s denunciation of poetry annoyed me and inevitably brought to mind current political discourses against art and the humanities. For instance, I see how ‘non-fiction-lit-bros-podcasters’ and political censors could use the weight of Plato’s theories to argue against ‘amoral’ or ‘useless’ art nowadays. Measuring art by its morality or applicability, apart from being an obviously philistine idea, seems outdated and gauche, especially in a world that came after Oscar Wilde proudly asserted that ‘all art is quite useless.’
Despite centuries of artists and critics affirming that art possesses an intrinsic and immeasurable value in itself, I still find myself compelled to elaborate a defence—both in response to the rise of artificial intelligence to the detriment of creativity and the growing dominance of over-rationalistic, utilitarian, and politically motivated attacks on the arts and humanities. While a closer reading reveals that Plato’s critique of art is distinct from the arguments of contemporary conservative politicians, on the surface, his words lend themselves to misinterpretation, which I will explore.
Plato’s condemnation of art as something that distances us from reality and truth has always been controversial. Some scholars claim he didn’t actually mean to banish the poets from his ideal city, others say it was exactly what he intended, and the text is ambiguous enough to support both visions. According to Julia Sushytska1, Plato juxtaposes myth and logos (a concept associated with reasoned discourse and rational thought) in his theory of the ideal state, sometimes antagonising them, and sometimes using one to explain the other. As with most opposites, myth and logos are not opponents since they are complementary, as we can understand myth through logos and vice-versa. Despite its attempt to provide an alternative to fanciful beliefs, philosophy still relies on myth, including in The Republic: Plato uses stories such as the famous Allegory of the Cave or the supernatural Myth of Er to further illustrate his philosophical arguments.
However, to understand Plato’s criticism of art and poetry, we must take a step back and discuss his Theory of Forms–arguably the most useful theoretical apparatus found in the book. Imagine there are three levels of reality: (1) an unchanging, eternal, and absolute realm of reality, in which ‘true things’ exist, such as beauty and justice in itself—those are ideals he calls ‘forms’ that must be pursued even if we can’t realise them in their perfect form; (2) a mutable, imperfect, and decaying realm of reality, considered the manifestation of the form–acts of justice or beautiful things are not to be mistaken with justice and beauty in itself. It’s the difference between the principle and the embodiment of said principle; (3) a representation (mimesis) of the second realm, which Plato sometimes equals to illusions or shadows–it’s the poem narrating an act of justice or the painting of a beautiful thing. This theory can be applied to many different subjects and it’s a great concept to know if you want to study semiotics, for example.
For Plato, true philosophy belongs to the first realm where ‘The Good’ and ‘The Truth’ exist. Reaching this level of wisdom and understanding is what the individual must endeavour to do through an intellectual quest, as illustrated by The Allegory of the Cave: discovering the truth is like leaving the cave and seeing sunlight for the first time after only seeing shadows on a wall. Art and poetry, on the other hand, would be obstacles in the path of truth found in the first realm, since they are imitations of material life which is itself only secondary reality; as mere reflections of the physical world, art and poetry are separated from the truth by a third:
‘We must ask ourselves whether those who have met the poets have, when they see or hear their works, failed to perceive that they are representations at the third remove from reality, and easy to produce without any knowledge of the truth, because they are appearances and not realities (Book X, 598-e)
‘that the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects he represents and that the art of representation is something that has no serious value; and that this applies above all to all tragic poetry, epic or dramatic.’ (Book X, 602-b)2
Therefore, if man’s goal in life is to know the Truth, namely, know things in their Forms, in a city designed to promote such ideals there is no place for ‘distractions’ like art and poetry. According to Morriss Henry Partee3:
‘Plato's unyielding refusal to accept anything less than absolute knowledge precludes any admission that beautiful language could lead man to virtue. Accordingly, Plato applies the same strictures to poetry that he places on language throughout his dialogues. Rhetoric, poetry, reasoned discourse, all must primarily contain the truth.’
In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher is concerned with true beauty in itself, and the poet is only concerned with its images, making poetry inherently inferior. However, he seemingly overlooks the possibility that art can be a vehicle–if not the vehicle—for reaching beauty (and other virtues) in its Form. The curious thing is that Plato does not disregard the effects of poetry; rather, his concern lies in their potential threat to the intellect. His mistrust of poetry coexists, paradoxically, with his deep appreciation for it. By stirring the emotions, poetry, in his view, clouds rational thought.
‘Poetry has the same effect on us when it represents sex and anger, and the other desires and feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany all our actions. It waters them when they ought to be left to wither, and makes them control us when we ought, in the interests of our own greater welfare and happiness, to control them.’ (Book X, 606-d)
At moments like these, he sounds like a converted sinner; one who knows the delights of vice and therefore damns it more than the average person because he’s scared of its powers. I’m reminded of Wilde again, when he wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray that ‘every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.’
What Plato considers a regrettable loss of emotional control is actually one of the greatest effects of art: it allows us to feel and experience sensations beyond ourselves. Elsewhere in the dialogue, the virtuous man is said to ‘imitate’ the Form of virtue. This suggests that artistic representation need not be mere mechanical reproduction, as in creating the world with a mirror (Republic Book X, 597). If a man can imitate the Form of virtue, then a poet who depicts his actions is, in turn, imitating that very virtue.
The argumentative flaw is in this third degree of separation between the Form and man; again, what Plato denies is that this imitation of virtue (Form) by art can be a pathway, an instrument or an enabler for man to reach the Good; instead, he accuses art of leading man astray. George Eliot once wrote that ‘Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot’4, perfectly encapsulating how art can transcend the limits of individual experience, allowing us to be in contact with a myriad of points of view, even encouraging sympathy for stories and characters considered ‘immoral’ in the Platonist vision. For Plato, this sympathy is dangerous, and vulnerability is seen as a flaw instead of a cathartic liberation:
If you consider that the poet gratifies and indulges the instinctive desires of a part of us, which we forcibly restrain in our private misfortunes, with its hunger for tears and for an uninhibited indulgence in grief. Our better nature, being without adequate intellectual or moral training, relaxes its control over these feelings […] For very few people are capable of realizing that what we feel for other people must infect what we feel for ourselves, and that if we let our pity for the misfortunes of others grow too strong it will be difficult to restrain our feelings in our own. (Book X, 606-a,b)
While other dialogues acknowledge the possibility of moral poetry, Book X of The Republic firmly rejects the idea that any poetry known to Plato could meet his standards. In his ideal state, only moral art is permitted—art that needs to prove that it has a didactic and edifying function:
‘But in case we are condemned for being insensitive and bad mannered, let us add that there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry. [...] However, let us freely admit that if drama and poetry written for pleasure can prove to us that they have a place in a well-run society, we will gladly admit them, for we know their fascination only too well ourselves; but it would be wicked to abandon what seems to be the truth.’ (Book X, 607-b)
Though this may not have been Plato’s precise intention, I find this perspective troubling, as it echoes a form of censorship that is increasingly prevalent today: a kind of moral sanitisation, particularly evident in cinema. At its core, this impulse stems from fear. Like some modern conservatives, Plato worries that the beauty of language can obscure the beauty of thought, leading to misinterpretation or misinformation—where depth is lost in the aesthetics and critique risks being mistaken for romanticisation.
What I found perplexing is that The Republic seems to have all of the qualities that Plato condemns in poetry: the dialogue is rich with allegories, myths, dramatic situations, beautiful language, humour, and the presentation of contrary opinions. And if that wasn’t contradictory enough, the book ends in the most poetic way possible with the lovely and eschatological Myth of Er. It narrates the story of Er, a man who saw the afterlife and came back as a messenger about this ‘wonderfully strange place’(Book XI, 614-c). Concluding a chapter on how your actions in life determine your fate after death with a myth attests to Plato's belief in the efficacy of mythology (which uses poetic language) in teaching, even though he explicitly argued otherwise. As Tae-Yeoun Keum explains,
‘In borrowing from the conventions of Greek mythology to create his own philosophical myths, Plato was attesting to the power of myth to reach, and to reshape, the stories we take for granted about our natural and social world. Such stories, in turn, can provide a stable imaginative framework of values and expectations for organising political experiences in meaningful ways, and can be vital to framing the way we think about our environment and our places in it.’5
In short, Plato recognises that poetic language is capable of provoking real sensations of pleasure and pain, fear and ecstasy, but he never dismisses the hierarchy in which feelings and sensations are inferior to intellectual reason. Thus, even if I sympathise with Nietzsche’s rebuke of Plato, I can't entirely label him as the nemesis of Dionysian expression.
The unresolved tension between these two facets of Plato is what makes The Republic so difficult to define, and after weeks of intellectual struggle I believe the only one to go is through a compromise: instead of trying to distinguish which force dominates the other in Plato’s work, namely, if Apollonian or Dionysian, we should try to see how they balance each other out.
Embracing Plato’s paradoxical treatment of poetry took me a while, but it was crucial for understanding his philosophy. Yes, he believes that poetry is dangerous but only because in doing so, he admits its power to enchant, instruct and overpower the senses.
Throughout The Republic, art, myth and politics are always connected, sometimes to the point of being mutually determined. I appreciate Keum’s analysis of this aspect, for she successfully draws the parallels between Plato’s political treatment of myth and ours:
‘Concerns about myth are often bound up with concerns about misinformation. But these anxieties go beyond a worry about factual inaccuracies that require correction. Rather, when scholars and commentators designate something as a myth, they are usually grappling with a more existential threat: a symbolically powerful narrative that seems immune to correction altogether, but that, nonetheless, has the power to captivate our imaginations. The language of myth, for instance, has recently been used to talk about frontier imagery in US immigration policy – ‘the myth of the border wall’ – as well as nostalgic appeals to a somehow more authentic version of a nation’s people – from the ‘myth of a “real” America’, to the ‘myths of Englishness’ that made rounds during the Brexit campaign.’
I think the problem in understanding the role of myth lies in trying to conform Plato’s ideas into absolutes, for they are distinctly ambiguous and often intentionally vague. According to Partee, Plato recognises that theory can never be completely realised in practice, for action always comes less close to truth than thought. After being questioned by his listeners about how they will create such a wonderful city, Socrates tells them to imagine a painting of a perfectly beautiful man and then asks back, ‘Is our picture any the worse drawn, then, because we can't show how it can be realised in fact?’. (Book V, 472-d).
Considering everything that has been said about art being dispensable because it can't be realised in the real world, you can imagine my outrage at this false and flawed analogy since a political system, as opposed to a piece of art, has the inherent expectation of being realised somehow.
This is one of the many contradictions and ambiguities found in The Republic, which explains why there is so much academic dissent about it. For some, the Republic’s impossibility is not a flaw, as T.J. Saunders argued: ‘To suppose that Plato ever thought that the Republic was attainable would be to suppose him capable not merely of optimism or idealism but of sheer political naiveté.’
For Partee, Plato’s unwavering emphasis on the importance of Forms throughout the dialogues should caution readers against dismissing The Republic as merely an unattainable ideal. For Plato, his envisioned republic was more ‘real’ than any existing state. This reflects a distinctly Platonic perspective: the belief that theory, rather than practice, brings us closer to truth and reality. In this view, the ideal state—or the ideal man—is the truest (realest) expression of what a state or man should be.
Thus, one possible interpretation is that, for Plato, the Republic represents one of many Forms—an ideal to be emulated and pursued and never fully realised. By definition, it is perfect and absolute, and such perfection can exist only in the realm of what he considers to be truly real: the world of Forms, a reality that transcends the physical world–the metaphysical.
After managing to accommodate so many inconsistencies, I now understand The Republic not as a utopian fantasy meant for intellectual amusement but as a guide for how one should order one’s life. Plato’s ethical precepts are meant to be universally applicable, just as Kant’s are. The fact that most people are incapable of fully following the Categorical Imperative does not make the principle invalid.
Similarly, we see this tension between ideal and practice in religion—most notably in Christ. Philosophy and faith alike present ideals that are, in reality, unattainable, perhaps precisely so that humanity will never cease striving for self-improvement. In this sense, Christ himself can be thought of as a Platonic Form. Dostoevsky, in contemplating Christ’s suffering, may well have been an inadvertent Platonist:
‘Christ alone could love man as himself, but Christ was a perpetual ideal to which man strives and, according to the law of nature, should strive. Meanwhile, since the appearance of Christ as the ideal of man in the flesh, it has become clear as day that the highest final development of the personality must arrive at this (at the very end of the development, the final attainment of the goal): that man finds, knows, and is convinced, with the full force of his nature, that the highest use a man can make of his personality, of the full development of his Ego—is, as it were, to annihilate that Ego, to give it totally and to everyone undividedly and unselfishly. In this way, the law of Ego fuses with the law of humanism, and in this fusion, both the Ego and the all (apparently two extreme opposites) mutually annihilate themselves one for the other, and at the same time each attains separately, and to the highest degree, their own individual development’ (excerpt from Dostoyevsky’s diaries)
Returning to Nietzsche’s critique of the absence of myth in philosophy, I’d say that we can't fully blame Plato; indeed, he provided the basis for dozens of rationalist philosophical movements, but the lack of enchantment and Dionysian energy is more due to the Enlightenment than to him alone. It was in 18th-century Europe that myth came to be dismissed as a mere cultural heirloom that was fundamentally at odds with modern life.
Philosophical narratives often operate within a framework that envisions the history of knowledge as a model of civilisational progress—an ever-ascending, linear trajectory that steadily moves away from myth. Societies that rely on mythology as a foundation for knowledge, using it to structure their understanding of the world, are often regarded as primitive in comparison to those grounded in rationalist principles.
This conception of epistemic development has profoundly shaped philosophy’s understanding of itself. The evolution of philosophical thought is frequently mapped as a movement ‘from mythos to logos,’ as has often been noted. Within this perspective, most philosophers continue the task of disentangling reason from myth—identifying the myths that still influence our thinking and culture, subjecting them to critical scrutiny, and ultimately replacing them with knowledge grounded in scientific or rationalistic methods. What Nietzsche pointed out, and what I agree with, is that this attitude removes a certain mystery that is necessary for us to maintain a fascination with the world and art; over-rationalising something removes the ‘sparkle’ that initially amused us (or ‘that gemlike flame’, in the words of Walter Pater6), turning what was enchanting into something prosaic. This loss, in my experience, takes the fun and romance out of things. It's like Susan Sontag explained:
‘The effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.’7
Despite my reservations about rationalistic frameworks, Plato’s critique remains undeniably significant. His challenge to dogma was, in itself, a revolutionary step in the history of Western thought, setting a precedent that shaped the very foundations of philosophy. Yet the most valuable part of this reading experience was precisely the process of dissecting Plato’s arguments. Undoubtedly, he was a genius and an intellectual pioneer, but the nature of first ideas is that they are incomplete.
Reading critically means questioning the arguments placed before us. It is not pretentious to challenge great thinkers—on the contrary, that is precisely the service they offer us. I have learned the most not from what Plato explains, but from what he fails to address. His omissions demand reflection: Where does his theory fall apart? Why does The Republic fail to be implemented? Why is it impractical? Why should we not ban the poets? Heidegger once wrote, ‘The more original a thinking is, the richer will be what is unthought in it. The unthought is the most precious gift that a thinking has to convey’8. In other words, the most meaningful way to engage with a text like this is to recognize its flaws and explore why they exist.
This does not mean reading with a cynical eye, waiting to pounce on every inconsistency, but rather refusing to take ideas at face value. Keep your critical perspective active, and you will always learn something from a book—even if you disagree with it. In fact, articulating why you disagree is far more instructive than simply nodding along. That is what I would call reasonable doubting, and what I’d consider to be the core of good philosophical practice.
On the Non-Rivalry Between Poetry and Philosophy: Plato's "Republic", Reconsidered — Julia Sushytska; Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal Vol. 45, No. 1, a special issue: BETWEEN POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY (March 2012), pp. 55-70
All of Plato’s quotations are from the Penguin edition (2003), translated from Greek by Desmond Lee.
Plato's Banishment of Poetry — Morriss Henry Partee; The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 29, No. 2 (Winter, 1970), pp. 209-222
From George Eliot’s essay The Natural History of German Life
Why philosophy needs myth — Tae-Yeoun Keum for Aeon Magazine
From Walter Pater’s (excellent) book Studies in the History of the Renaissance
From Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation
From Martin Heidegger’s book What Is Called Thinking?