Poesia contro filosofia da Platone a Boezio

This article attempts to reconstruct Boethius' reasoning on poetry in the Consolatio Philosophiae. Interpreting Platonic themes, Boethius bequeathed to the Middle Ages two conflicting ideas of poetry: philosophical poetry, which is non-mimetic in that it expresses the object not through images but through numerus (rhythm, arithmetic essence), and mimetic poetry, identified with elegy, according to the model of Plato's Republic, which does not reflect the image of the object (as the equation between poetry and painting in the Aristotelian-Horatian tradition would have it) but its instability and evanescence.