passion and madness that sent the heart into spasms and pressed the mind to distraction. This was about the last thing a new state needed. “Poetry mustn't be taken seriously as a serious thing laying hold of truth,” Socrates warns. “The man who hears it must be careful, fearing for the regime in himself.” Thus: Hesiod’s magnificent Works and Days, banned. Homer, banned. There has always been, about poetry, this sense of the magical, that it was a key to something intimately bound to the human mystery. It was no surprise to me to find, when I went back to re-read Turing’s “Can Machines Think?” essay, that the very first thing the great mathematician dreamed up to ask a digital brain was: “Write me a sonnet.” Poetry has always marked a test. Socrates and Plato gatekeep the poets out of their republic because they know the mad part of the soul verse can touch. It is hard to blame them. After all, they were among the earliest Western minds to try to dispel madness and superstition and sophistry. Without their logic and effort there would be no Aristotle, no science, none of the sense of our world as a comprehensible machine. The confidence to philosophize - which for them meant also to poke at the political wiring of our world - demanded the break from poetry and mysticism as a source of action or legitimacy. Had they failed, we'd still be in the dark. But had they completely succeeded? We'd hardly be human. You know, as I’ve said, when I first moved to China, there were so many things that baffled me. (There still are, to be honest.) But very high on that list was a peculiarity of ancient Chinese political life. For thousands of years the greatest poets and painters had also been emperors and politicians. Su Dongpo, for instance, the official who turned the lake city of Hangzhou into one of the great cultural centers of human history is also one of China’s best regarded poets. The calligraphy of the Qing dynasty Mingzhen Emperor is marked with a temprament of transcend