The Madness of the Muses
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Socrates — τρίτη δὲ ἀπὸ Μουσῶν κατοκωχή τε καὶ μανία, λαβοῦσα ἁπαλὴν καὶ ἄβατον ψυχήν, ἐγείρουσα καὶ ἐκβακχεύουσα κατά τε ᾠδὰς καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἄλλην ποίησιν,
Now the third god-sent madness: the poet's. It descends from the Muses and takes hold of a particular kind of soul — hapalē kai abatos, 'tender and untrodden,' young and pure, virgin ground not yet trampled by the world. Such a soul the Muse-madness wakes and sets into a Bacchic frenzy, pouring out song and every other kind of poetry, and through it the great deeds of the past are given their beauty and the generations to come are taught. And there is a warning folded in, which Socrates completes just after: anyone who arrives at poetry's door without this madness, trusting that skill and rules will make him a poet, produces work that is unfinished, and it vanishes beside the poetry of the mad. Real poetry, in other words, is not made; it is given. The Muse is the maker, and the poet only the tender soul she plays through.
The third divine madness is the poet's. It comes from the Muses, and seizes a soul that is tender and untrodden — young, open, unspoiled — waking it and setting it into a Bacchic frenzy of song and verse. Through such possessed souls the deeds of the past are adorned and posterity is taught. The sane technician who writes by craft alone is nowhere beside the poet the god has maddened.
This is the third rung of the ladder Socrates is climbing — prophecy, purification, and now poetry — each a divine madness, each higher than the last, all leading toward love at the top. And the poetic madness is described in the strongest language yet. It is a katokōchē, a 'possession,' a being-held-fast by the god, and it ekbakcheuei the soul — sets it raving as Dionysus sets the maenads raving. Plato reaches across from the Muses to the Bacchic god on purpose: real poetry is not the achievement of a skilled sober mind but an ecstasy, a standing-outside-oneself, in which a god pours creation through a soul that has stopped being merely reasonable. Hence the devastating aside about the technician. The man who comes to poetry ek technēs, 'by craft,' persuaded that rules and competence will make him a poet, turns out ateles — unfinished, uninitiated, incomplete — and his careful work simply disappears beside the work of the mad. It is the same verdict the whole palinode is building toward, now trained on art: what a sober craft can produce is always capped below what possession can. And it sets up the fourth and highest madness exactly. If even poetry requires being taken over by a god, how much more the thing poetry is only reaching toward — love, the madness that seizes the soul not to make songs but to carry it back to the beauty all the songs are about.
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