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- For other uses of this term, see Ion (disambiguation).
Plato's Ion aims to give an account of poetry in dialogue form. Socrates and Ion discuss poetic inspiration, with particular attention to the question of whether poetry is an art or skill, or whether it is composed in fits of divine inspiration. The resulting critique of poetry is a less complex version of the critique of imitation Plato would later present in the Republic.
The work is what would today be called "literary criticism," and a criticism of literary criticism itself. Plato presents the almost iconic image of the raving, mad and divine poet inspired by the muse. In the dialogue, this figure is played by Ion, who is a rhapsode, or a professional performer of poetry in ancient Greece and (by his own account) a celebrated and eminent performer: at one point he claims that he deserves to be "crowned by the Homeridae" for his promotion of Homer. In the course of Socrates's conversation with him, Ion comes to admit that poetry is not a distinct skill like fishing or medicine. In fact, the poet has no distinct object of knowledge; even when he speaks about fishing or medicine, he speaks from the authority of fishermen or doctors. In saying that poetry is not a distinctive area of expertise, Socrates reveals his absence of interest in the form of the poem. As in the Republic, he is solely concerned with its content.
The dialogue offers the striking metaphor of poetic inspiration as a kind of magnetism (). Socrates asks us to imagine a series of magnets suspended from a height. At the top is the divine voice. When the poet is inspired, he allows the divine voice to speak through him; he becomes its mouthpiece. As a performer of Homeric poetry, Ion is yet a third magnet who allows Homer to speak through him. Anyone who comes within this magnetic field of inspiration may compose poetry, recite it, or talk about it. The literary critic as an audience of poetry thus becomes inspired in the writing of literary criticism. Therefore, literary criticism is not simply a piecing together of a text for the purposes of making a structured and solely rational interpretation of it. Plato would like to claim that there is something divine, non-objective, and non-reductive about poetry and the arts related to it (literary criticism).
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- (entire text in Greek and English, trans. by W.R.M Lamb)
"Ion (dialogue)"