Like writing, reading so often begins in romance and ends in pragmatism. On first looking into the Ion of Plato or Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’, the idea of the poet as divinely inspired enthrals. Only later do we recognise that such celebrations are of a piece with the banishment of the poets. The line ‘weave a circle around him thrice’ we either neglect or hazily register in magical, runic terms. Only on rereading do we discern the theme of exclusion, of quarantine, the structure by which society simul – t aneously celebrates and ostracises its artists, only by setting Plato's Republic beside his Ion can we recognise that the very irrationality that exalts and sets the poet apart also makes the poet accountable to – or excluded from – a polis constructed according to the principles of philosophical rationalism. Hence, the perennial lament of the artist that he is both shaman and scapegoat, condemned to live inside and outside, at both the defining, mythopoeic centre yet at the ethical margins of his society.