_Republic_, VI, 485, ff.] The moral instincts of the philosopher
are unerring, Plato declares, because the philosopher's attention is
riveted upon the unchanging idea of the good which underlies the
confusing phantasmagoria of the temporal world. The poets retort that
the moral instincts of the poet, more truly than of the philosopher, are
unerring, because the poet's attention is fixed upon the good in its
most ravishing aspect, that of beauty, and in this guise it has an
irresistible charm which it cannot hold even for the philosopher.

Poets' convictions on this point have remained essentially unchanged
throughout the history of poetry. Granted that there has been a strain
of deliberate perversity running through its course, cropping out in the
erotic excesses of the late-classic period, springing up anew in one
phase of the Italian renaissance, transplanted to France and England,
where it appeared at the time of the English restoration, growing again
in France at the time of the literary revolution, thence spreading
across the channel into England again. Yet this is a minor current. The
only serious view of the poet's moral nature is that nurtured by the
Platonism of every age. Milton gave it the formulation most familiar to
English ears, but Milton by no means originated it. Not only from his
Greek studies, but from his knowledge of contemporary Italian aesthetics,
he derived the idea of the harmony between the poet's life and his
creations which led him to maintain that it is the poet's privilege to
make of his own life a true poem.

"I am wont day and night," says Milton, "to seek for this idea of the
beautiful through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the
shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on as with certain
assured traces." [Footnote: Prose works, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symons ed.]
The poet's feeling cannot possibly lead him astray when his sense of