I'm just starting out studying Plato myself under a philosopher and he says it's no use trying to read Plato unless you have read A LOT of literature. This is the only way, he argues, that you will acquire the tools necessary for the study of philosophy. But you must read literature "the right way" -- you must re-experience what the author has experienced. This is much easier to accomplish reading literature than studying philosophy, for that is all literature is: the translation onto the page of what the author has experienced.

Philosophy is the same thing, but once removed. It can get abstract and you can get lost trying to find the thread back to the philosopher's originating experience. But philosophy has this in common with literature: it is also an experience. And the philosophical method entails re-experiencing what the philosopher has experienced. If you don't do this, it will be no use trying to "understand" -- perhaps that's not even the right word to be using. You must always concentrate on EXPERIENCE. I actually go around counting how many times an explanatory text on Plato uses that word. Although I haven't read it yet, the text you pointed out -- "Approaching Plato" -- uses that word more than twenty times. One of the lines seems very appropriate: "The Euthydemus is not a dialogue to study. It is an experience."

Sorry about maybe having too long a comment, but here is a quote from one of his lessons (which I translated from the original, in Portuguese):

"One book that I will indicate — don’t read it now, just keep this in your head — is the book on Plato by Paul Friedländer [Plato: an Introduction. New York: Harper and Row, 1958]. It’s a great book, which left its mark on three or four generations of Plato scholars. What is Friedländer's secret? He links ideas back to experience. He searches out the specific circumstances, concrete and human, in which certain questions occurred to Socrates and Plato, and shows how they interpreted and worked on their own experience to extract from them the philosophical concepts that they would later discuss. To discover the experiential (not “experimental”) substance of the philosophical concepts is practically everything. This is the philosophical method itself. It is an immense effort, not only in the intellectual sphere, but also in the psychological and moral spheres as well. Many times it will be necessary to search for the roots of philosophical concepts in internal experiences that you had twenty or thirty years before: it is an intense labor of anamnesis, of self-knowledge and self-analysis, and what spoils philosophy are the people who do not know how to do this. Because whoever doesn’t know how to do this uses philosophical concepts as fetishes, as if they were things in and of themselves, and they go into a verbalism without restraint in which they never know what they are talking about and never admit to being called upon to clarify. These people have fear: since they have no human substance nor experience of life, but only what they read in books, they never know what philosophers are talking about. They know what the philosopher said, but not to what that corresponds in reality, and therefore what they say has no substance in reality; it is only academic verbiage."

Louis Lavelle

Louis Lavelle
Le plus grand bien que nous faisons aux autres hommes n'est pas de leur communiquer notre richesse, mais de leur découvrir la leur.

Notes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria

Notes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria

from CHAPTER 13
[IMAGINATION]
On the imagination, or esemplastic power

1) The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge divides imagination into two parts: the primary and secondary imagination. As the "living Power and prime Agent," the primary imagination is attributed a divine quality, namely the creation of the self, the "I Am." However, because it is not subject to human will, the poet has no control over the primary imagination. It is the intrinsic quality of the poet that makes him or her a Creator; harking back to Wordsworth, the primary imagination can be likened to poetic genius. The secondary imagination is an echo of the primary. It is like the former in every way except that it is restricted in some capacity. It co-exists with the conscious will, but because of this, the secondary imagination does not have the unlimited power to create. It struggles to attain the ideal but can never reach it. Still the primary governs the secondary, and imagination gives rise to our ideas of perfection. In this way, Coleridge and Shelley share the belief that inimitable forms of creation can only exist in the mind. As soon as the poet decides to write down his or her poem, for example, the work is inevitably diminished.

seek what they sought

“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.”

Matsuo Basho quote

leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself

Basho Quotations : Brief selections from a Japanese Haiku master

"Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one - when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural - if the object and yourself are separate - then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit." "Go to the object. Leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Do not impose yourself on the object. Become one with the object. Plunge deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. Your feeling is not natural when the object and yourself are separate. You must become one with the object in order for your poetry to be true." "No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it."