Plato's ION, my translation 533D - 534C

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For, as I was just saying, this is not art, with which you are speaking well about Homer; but rather divine power which moves you like that in the stone Euripides called a magnet but most people call Heracleian.

For this stone not only attracts iron rings but also charges them with a power by which they to do the same as the stone and draw other rings. So that sometimes a long chain of pieces of iron and rings, suspended from one another, is formed: all depending for this power on that stone. And so also the Muse inspires men herself, and by means of these inspired men the inspiration spreads to others and keeps them connected like a chain.

For all the great epic poets sing all their beautiful songs not from art, but because they are enthused with inspiration and possessed by a divine power, and in like manner the lyric poets, just like the priests of the Great Mother don't dance in their right minds, so also the lyric poets composing these lovely lyrics are not in their right minds. But when they get into the harmony and rhythm, they are dancing in Bacchic frenzy and possessed by a divine power, just as bacchantes are out of their minds and possessed when drawing honey and milk from the rivers, so also the soul of lyric poets performs this work, which is the same thing, so they say.

For the poets tell us, it seems, that the lyrics they bring us from the honey-dripping fountains in certain gardens and groves of the Muses, just as the bees, and winging the same as these [with their winged words]; and they are speaking the truth. For a poet is a light and winged and sacred being, and not able to create unless entered into a different state of consciousness and outside his normal senses, and his own mind is no longer in him, for as long as he holds onto that possession, every man is unable to create poetry or sing an ode.

So as it is not by art they are composing and saying so many things about the deeds of heroes, just like you do about the poems of homer, but rather by divine muses, each is able to compose only that to which the Muse motivated him: one man, dithyrambs; another, another, encomiums; a third, musical productions; a fourth, epodes; a fifth, iambics; but each is useless about the others' specialties.