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Unit 8 · Reading Comprehension English · 2020 cycle (Shift 2)

Poetry is described as one of Plato's two higher forms of divine madness. What is the other?

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Correct answer: C. Love

Explanation

Phaedrus: the madness of the poet and the madness of love (eros).

Note: Passage II is from Walter Pater's essay 'Dante Gabriel Rossetti' (Appreciations, 1889), summarised here. Pater recalls Plato's view of poetry as one of the higher forms of 'divine mania'. He grants that poetry may have 'a mere insanity incidental to it', the 'defect of its quality', which in Rossetti appears as a forced and almost grotesque materialising of abstractions in his personifications. He compares this with Dante's bondage to the scholastic realism of the Middle Ages.

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