 References to magic serve poorly as explanations but they bespeak the need for explanation. Plato sees that some power must be drawing people to give up both knowledge and the taste for knowledge. But what is striking about this deus ex machina that explains poetry’s attractiveness is what it does not say. In other dialogues the magic of poetry is attributed to one version or another of divine inspiration. Odd that the Republic makes no reference to inspiration when dialogues as different as the Apology and the Laws mention it and the Ion and the Phaedrus spell out how it works. Odder still, Plato almost never cites imitation and divine inspiration together (the lone exception Laws 719c), as if to say that the two are incompatible accounts of poetry. Will inspiration play a role ancillary to imitation, or do the two approaches to poetry have nothing to do with one another?