The Hatred of Literature

by William Marx; a review:

To this effect, Marx points out that the most famous moment in the Western history of hating literature, Plato’s banishment of the poets, is now the least understood. He cites the blindness of his contemporaries, who are unable to see that they are living in the very world Plato hoped for, conceived, and willed, that is to say a society whose members only ever open a book to experience the purely gratuitous pleasures of the imagination; a world in which literature has lost nearly all power and authority and has become an empty shell merely used to pass the time by a shrinking class increasingly monopolized by many other distractions.