Furthermore, even though everyone may agree that a lurking sense of hostile criticism is back of the poet's self-absorption, another ground for skepticism may lie in our assumption that Plato is the central figure in the opposition. It is usually with purpose to excite the envy of contemporary enemies that poets call attention to their graces, the student may discover. Frequently the quarrels leading them to flaunt their personalities in their verses have arisen over the most personal and ephemeral of issues. Indeed, we may have appeared to falsify in classifying their enemies under general heads, when for Christopher North, Judson, Belfair, Friend Naddo, Richard Bame, we substituted faces of cipher foolishness, abstractions which we named the puritan, the philosopher, the philistine. Possibly by so doing we have given the impression that poets are beating the air against an abstraction when they are in reality delivering thumping blows upon the body of a personal enemy. And if these generalizations appear indefensible, still more misleading, it may be urged, is an attempt to represent that the poet, when he takes issue with this and that opponent, is answering a challenge hidden away from the unstudious in the tenth book of Plato's _Republic_. It is doubtful even whether a number of our poets are aware of the existence of Plato's challenge, and much more doubtful whether they have it in mind as they write. Second thought must make it clear, however, that to prove ignorance of Plato's accusation on the part of one poet and another does not at all impair the possibility that it is his accusation which they are answering. So multiple are the threads of influence leading from the _Republic_ through succeeding literatures and civilizations that it is unsafe to assert, offhand, that any modern expression of hostility to poetry may not be traced, by a patient untangler of evidence, to a source in the _Republic_. But even this is aside from the point. One might concede that the wide-spread modern antagonism to poetry would have been the same if Plato had never lived, and still maintain that in the _Republic_ is expressed for all time whatever in anti-aesthetic criticism is worthy of a serious answer. Whether poets themselves are aware of it or not, we have a right to assert that in concerning themselves with the character of the ideal poet, they are responding to Plato's challenge. This may not be enough to justify our faith that these defensive expositions lead us anywhere. Let us agree that certain poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have answered Plato's challenge. But has the Poet likewise answered it? If from their independent efforts to paint the ideal poet there has emerged a portrait as sculpturally clear in outline as is Plato's portrait of the ideal philosopher, we shall perhaps be justified in saying, Yes, the Poet, through a hundred mouths, has spoken.