Ion

The Ion is the shortest of Plato's dialogues and one of the most influential. It records a conversation between Socrates and the rhapsode Ion, a professional reciter of Homer who has just won a poetry competition. Socrates forces Ion, through patient questioning, to confess that he can speak well only of Homer and not of any other poet, and that even of Homer he can speak well only when he is, as Socrates puts it, out of his right mind and possessed by a kind of divine inspiration.

The dialogue is the founding Western text on the question of poetic inspiration. Its central image — the rhapsode as a magnet to whom the poet's inspiration flows from the Muse and through whom it flows to the listener — has shaped two and a half millennia of thought about what poetry actually is. The Romantic theory of poetic genius descends from it; so does the modern theory of inspiration in any creative practice.