Those who can, do …

… those who can't, theorize: Book Review: 'Literary Criticism From Plato to Postmodernism' by James Seaton - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Plato actually expressed two contradictory views of imaginative writing, as Mr. Seaton explains. The Plato of "The Republic" distrusted poets because, of course, they lied. Homer said things happened that didn't happen. The Plato of the "Symposium," by contrast, allowed that poets can be and often are inspired by the gods. 

It has long seemed to me that Plato's "Republic" is a vast exercise in irony, reducing to absurdity the notion of a purely rational society by showing how imprisoning such would be.