Have been reading Edgar Wind's classic study, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. What the neo-Platonists of the Florentine School (Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola) had to say about "vision" vs. "joy", or the threefold aims of the soul (contemplation, activity, pleasure - Saturn, Jupiter, Venus - there are a lot of variations on this), seems relevant to what I was trying to say yesterday about "vision" vs. "minor poetry".

Ficino, for example, valued joy & pleasure over the intellectual search for truth; pleasure in itself was not to be condemned, only it was to be acknowledged that earthly pleasure was limited by time. However, the whole Platonic & Neoplatonic concept of pleasure was derived within the pattern of a divine cosmos - "love is blind" because at the deepest level, the soul intuits its relation with divine Love without needing to "see" it; at some point the distinction between intellectual insight & spiritual love is no more.

So also maybe at some point the distinction between playful pleasing poetry & exalted visions of Reality also disappears.