The prophetic vision of the inspired poet is placed under the sign of the goddess Mnemosyne, Memory, the .mother of the Muses. Memory does not confer the power of evoking personal recollections, of seeing the order of events that have faded into the past. She gives the poet - like the diviner - the privilege of beholding unchangeable and permanent reality; she brings him into contact with the originary being, a mere infinitesimal frac-tion of which is revealed to human beings in the march of time and immediately veiled once again. This function of revealing reality, attributed to a kind of memory that unlike ours, does not survey time but rather escapes from it, reappears in a modified form in philosophy's anamnesis.
— Jean-Pierre Vernant
Vernant is tracking something precise here: Mnemosyne is not a faculty for retrieving the past but a faculty for escaping time altogether. The inspired poet does not remember yesterday — he contacts what was never subject to yesterday, the stratum of being that the parade of events perpetually conceals and only briefly, accidentally, illuminates. This is why the Muses are her daughters rather than, say, daughters of Kronos. What they carry is not historical but ontological.
The passage earns its final sentence. When Plato inherits this and refashions it as anamnesis — the soul's recollection of the Forms it knew before embodiment — he is not inventing a new faculty, he is translating an archaic one into the language of philosophy. The translation is clean, and that is worth noticing. What gets dropped in the translation is Mnemosyne's connection to the raw plurality of the Muses, to inspiration as something that arrives from outside, that takes you. Platonic anamnesis is an interior act; it points the soul inward and upward. The older grammar pointed outward to originary being, which the poet contacted the way a diviner contacts what is hidden — not by ascending, but by being opened to what exceeds the moment.
Jean-Pierre Vernant·Myth and Thought Among the Greeks·1983