Literary criticism in the West begins with the wish that literature disappear. Plato's chief objection to Homer is that he exists. For to Plato poetry is a deception: it proffers imitations of imitations when life's purpose is to seek eternal truth; poetry stirs up refractory emotions, challenging reason's rule, making men womanish; it induces us to manipulate language for effect rather than strive for accuracy. The poets deliver many fine speeches, but when you question them about what they've said, their answers are puerile: they don't know what they're talking about. Though Plato can be eloquent about the appeal of literary art, to him poetry has no real place in creating the well-balanced soul or the just state. When he conceives his Utopia, Plato banishes the poets outside its walls.

All this is well known, yet it remains salutary to stop and think how odd it is for literary criticism to begin as it does. Is there any other kind of intellectual inquiry that originates in a wish to do away with its object? Imagine art history beginning in puritan iconoclasm; sociology in a commitment to deep solipsism; history in a wish that we should live always in the present.

I begin this book with reference to the quarrel between the poets and philosophers, which Plato said was already ancient in his time, because I think that, though changed in some important ways, that quarrel continues on into the present.