This is likewise the state of the philosopher
described in the _Phaedo_. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness,
is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to
be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without
doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse.
One of our minor American poets declares,
The bard who yields to flesh his emotion
Knows naught of the frenzy divine.
[Footnote: _Passion_, by Elizabeth Cheney. But compare Keats' protest
against the poet's abstract love, in the fourth book of _Endymion_.]
But this is not the genuine poet's point of view. In so far as he is a
Platonist--and "all poets are more or less Platonists" [Footnote: H. B.
Alexander, _Poetry and the Individual_, p. 46.]--the poet is led upward
to the love of ideal beauty through its incarnations in the world of
sense. Thus in one of the most Platonic of our poems, G. E. Woodberry's
_Agathon_, Eros says of the hero, who is the young poet of the
_Symposium_,
A spirit of joy he is, to beauty vowed,
Made to be loved, and every sluggish sense
In him is amorous and passionate.
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