Analysis Of Plato's Symposium

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ECHOES OF PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM DOWN THE AGES

“Because of the centrality and power of love in human experience, men and women throughout the ages have felt the compulsion to sing songs, to write verse, and to tell stories about this ineffable and mysterious force which leads them to the peaks of felicity, and to the depths of despair. Love indeed is an ultimate, if not the ultimate, human concern. It is the universal principle undergirding all human activity, the object of all human striving, resulting, naturally, in the need to examine and discuss it carefully.”- Dr. David Naugle 1

The above said things can be applied to Plato’s Symposium. Since time immemorial people have been reading it and thus getting influenced has tried to imitate Symposium in their works. Plato in his work has recorded the speeches of seven Athenians namely Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates and Alcibiades, six of which employ both story and verse to convey a variety of myths and motifs about the nature and function of Eros. The work also provides an insight into the complexities in Greek attitude towards sexual relations at that time. Originating with Plato’s writings on love, this tradition has evolved through works of Aristotle, Plotinus and revival of neo-platonism2 during the Renaissance. But the influence of Symposium does not end here. It can be traced in the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Freud, F. W. Rolfe, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Jacques Lacan, T. S. Eliot and many more. My aim in this paper is to trace the influen...

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...ve channelled portions of Plato’s Symposium into his sonnets which guides in the pursuit of beauty and truth. The sonnets even help in a better understanding of Symposium. The sonnets which are addressed to the fair youth mostly talks about desire, immortality, and deception in seeking love. In a way it gives the message that in order to find true beauty we must look with our hearts and not eyes since eyes can be deceive us but not heart as Plato says. Shakespeare’s sonnets, although they are mainly about the speaker’s love for the fair youth and dark lady, have been believed to be a replica of Plato’s idea of truth and beauty, their meaning and interpretations may change with the passage of time but they remain universal in thought and argument.

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