Missing final paragraphs from the Problem of Socrates lecture series (1958)
An incomplete version: "The Origins of Political Science and the Problem of Socrates: Six Public Lectures," Interpretation, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter 1996).
#15 ....As for the function of ministerial poetry, it is presented clearly and Platonically in the Tempest: Prospero, the master of Ariel, has to rule the noble Miranda and the base Caliban; he has to guide and to guard Miranda and to pinch and to whip Caliban. The function of ministerial poetry is twofold: it is ennobling and it is punitive or accusatory. The Platonic dialogue is capable also of performing the ennobling function of ministerial poetry. But it is unable to perform its punitive function except insofar as this function can be performed by comical means. No one, I believe, has understood this better than the greatest poet of punishment who called his poem "Divine Comedy."
#16: Plato was no enemy of poetry. He only denied that poetry can be autonomous. Yet, as in all cases of this kind, the appearance of unqualified hostility conveys a truth of its own. Poetry, poiesis, means making. And Plato is opposed to the principle of making, to an understanding of making as the principle of the world. The criticism of poetry in the 10th book of the Republic is characterized by the fact that the ideas are presented as artefacts, as things made by God. But, one must ask on the basis of what Plato suggests everywhere, with a view to what did God make the ideas? Did this making not presuppose ideas which are not made? In the Timaeus, Plato presents the God, the artificer of the world, as making the world by looking at the ideas which are not made in any way but are always in and of themselves. If there are no eternal things, things which are in no way "made," and if they are not the bonds which hold everything together and in its place, chaos follows. Either ideas are the highest beings, or else the fighting gods of popular mythology. The highest must be unchangeable in every respect; it can act only as an object of love or desire: as unmoved mover. The highest is not made and does not make. The denial of this, i.e., the praise of making, is the alternative to Plato's thought. It is only in this sense that Plato is opposed to "poetry." Let us never forget that the only earlier philosopher whom Plato honored by a dialogue and even by a dialogue title is Parmenides.