Lyric Poetry and Its Platonic Pedigree

In his Architext, Gérard Genette famously noted that both Plato and Aristotle are strangely silent on what moderns refer to as lyric. Accordingly, he came up with the influential conclusion that Plato excluded lyric poetry from literature, thus hampering its recognition as an 'architext' for a very long time. The study of Plato's profound engagement with poetry, however, may leed to different conclusions. In the Phaedrus, in particular, Plato emphatically and consistently contrasts epic rhapsodies with a number of poetic voices that, at least in our understanding, firmly belong to the world of lyric poetry, both choral and monodic. In so doing, Plato comes very close to a definition of lyric as a genre and, at the same time, pursues his own literary and philosophical agenda: through lyric poetry, he 'eroticises' speech, which results in philosophical rhetoric and proves crucial in describing philosophical discourse itself. The invention of lyric poetry, then, largely overlaps with the definition of philosophical discourse.