Plato was the first critic of poetry . His famous work is the Republic.
Contributions by Plato
- The Concept of Idealism; it means the doctrine of an internal realm of perpetual forms that shape the material and changeable world of the humans.
- He develops a dualistic approach in which he differentiates between metaphysical sphere and physical realm. He emphasizes the spiritual over the concrete and the spirituality of the metaphysical over the physical.
- Metaphysical world- that can be grasped only by the philosophical activity of the mind- is the truly real sphere of existence and represents the realm of reality, whereas the physical world just appears to be real and represents the realm of appearance.
- According to him, "Literature is related to the physical material, human realm of appearance". That's why Plato calls poets inferior and untrustworthy.
- He introduced the concept of “missies”- the imitation. Literature as “mimesis” is just another appearance of appearance in the physical world, another image of the things in the physical world, a copy or imitation of the copies or appearances forming the physical material world.
- He gave “the theory of ideas or forms”, it means everything that exists in this world is an imperfect copy of an ideal object that exists intellectually, metaphysically, mathematically outside the world of humans. For example, Divinity creates the idea of bed, the Craftsman creates an actual bed and the artist imitates that actual bed.
