Poetry Dangerous?

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates claims that poets “establish[] a bad system of government in people’s minds by gratifying their irrational side” (78). The government metaphor is interesting because this argument is situated within a larger discussion of what makes the best society. In this case, Socrates ends up concluding that the poets do not belong in his imaginary utopian republic because they rely too much on the emotions rather than reason. In this sense, poets “colonize” normal, rational minds and cause people to make irrational decisions.

What’s kind of funny today is the idea that poetic texts might be threatening. I can see violent movies, video games, and rock and roll as potentially making people more accepting of violence in the real world or obsessions with celebrities or Facebook diverting people from taking care of themselves in the real world, but I find it humorous to imagine anyone would be influenced in destructive ways by poetry. It’s even kind of hard to think of a poem that might be dangerous. I’ll try the dagger sequence from Act II Scene 1 of Macbeth where Macbeth is contemplating murder:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.

Basically, Macbeth has decided to kill the king and is imagining he sees a dagger, perhaps because he feels guilty in advance. In response to this illusion he draws his own dagger and says that the illusion of a dagger has encouraged him in his resolution to commit murder. I can picture Macbeth doing this, I can even imagine why he might be interested in killing someone else for political power, but just hearing about it doesn’t make me want to pull a knife from the kitchen drawer and hunt down my boss to get him out of my way to power. So, if literature is going to have an evil effect on me, it’s got to be more connected to my life and emotionally and rationally motivating. It would have to restructure my way of thinking. I can’t remember any texts with negative influences, but I have been influenced by Dead Man Walking to oppose the death penalty, and by Real Food to eat less processed food, neither of which is fiction or poetry. I wonder what makes these different? They were both rational and emotional in their impact.

Works Cited

Plato. From Republic. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 49-80. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. Jeremy Hylton. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. N.d. Web. 10 Sept. 2011. < http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/full.html>