“The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body want to reproduce the person. But it also – as Diotima tells Socrates – prompts the begetting of poems and laws, the works of Homer, Hesiod, and Lycurgus. The poem and the law may then prompt descriptions of themselves – literary and legal commentaries – that seek to make the beauty of the prior thing more evident, to make, in other words, the poem’s or law’s ‘clear discernibility’ even more ‘clearly discernible.’ Thus the beauty of Beatrice in La vita nuova requires of Dante the writing of a sonnet and the writing of that one sonnet prompts the writing of another: ‘After completing this last sonnet I was moved by a desire to write more poetry.’ The sonnets, in turn, place on Dante a new pressure, for as soon as his ear hears what he has made in meter, his hand wants to draw a sketch of it in prose: ‘This sonnet is divided into two parts . . .’; ‘This sonnet is divided into four parts . . . .’

(Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 4–5.)