Topic > The importance of poetry in the Republic - 1562

Poetry has the ability to arouse emotions and influence young people because it has the freedom to choose to say what it wants and there are no limits that confine it. Because words and sentences are able to persuade and convince the audience of what they are told. This is especially true for young people: «Don't you know that the beginning is the most important part of every work and that this is especially true for what is young and tender? Because at that point it is the most plastic, and everything assimilates to the model of which you want to give it the stamp. (Plato, Republic, Book III). This is exactly why we should not swear in front of or at small children. (Leckey Lecture). For children, their mindset is like a clean, white sheet of paper, and ideally, we should help them fill it with wise, educational information, not terrible ideas that will ruin them later in life. However, for sculpture there is a series of laws that must comply with (Lessing page 13). Since they have a limit to what can actually be put on a sculpture, this includes a limit to what the sculpture can offer people; the meaning is narrow. In contrast, there are no restrictions on what can be written in poetry and this is the issue raised by Plato. Because of the freedom of poetry to express whatever it wants, people will be confused and indifferent to what they say because they may think that what they heard is just a joke and continue to tell other people about it, but in reality it can have serious consequences ( Leckey