Athenian: “Now didn’t we hear you saying a few minutes ago
that a legislator ought not to allow the poets to compose
whatever happened to take their fancy? You see, they’d
never know when they were saying something in opposition
to the law and harming the state.”- Plato, Laws IV.
Rebels are red
Violence is true
Verse is subversive
And so are you
More at http://about.me/dklawitter.
Love the poem, Dan. Even though I understand his reasoning, Plato was much too hard on the poets. He’s one of my favorite philosophers, but still, even to this day, I find the length of censorship his philosophical system took with regard to the poets quite unsettling, to say the least.
Again, nice work.