Poetry and truth

Poetry and truth are related in this way. Poetry teaches us things we cannot learn from other sources. It speaks to us in a language that is different from the language of mathematics, logic and the natural sciences. And it puts us in touch with features of our life and environment – the inner and the outer world – to which we would have no access if it did not exist.
The language of poetry is the language of the imagination. It is a fact of human psychology that even the most abstract thoughts are accompanied by concrete images. By creating new images, poets enable us to think new thoughts, to reflect imaginatively on important aspects of our experience.
Not all poets succeed in doing this, but the best of them do. They convey important truths about life and death, joy and sorrow, childhood and old age, war and peace, love in all its forms, solitude, memory and the complexity of human emotions. And they convey these truths poetically, by using language in a special way, varying the patterns and rhythms of ordinary, everyday conversation, employing rhyme, assonance and alliteration, but, above all, by using simile and ‘metaphor’ to create striking and memorable images.
A simple example of the way thought and image are woven together in poetic texts is this Old Testament reflection from the Book of Job on the ephemeral character of man’s life: “Man wastes away like rotten wood, like a garment eaten by moths. He rises like a flower, and withers away; he disappears like a shadow, never to be seen again.”
There are four images in this short passage, where man’s fragile existence is compared to rotten wood, a moth-eaten dress, a flower withering away, and a fleeting shadow. A few lines later the poet uses yet another image: “As water evaporates from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so man goes to sleep and does not rise again.”
It is by such accumulation of images that the poem succeeds in conveying its truth. Shorn of those images the central idea loses much of its force.
Poets were the first ecologists. All great poets, including the authors of the earliest sacred texts in both eastern and western cultural traditions, have found in the natural environment a constant source of inspiration. Whether it was itself the subject of their poetic output, or whether it served as backdrop to it, nature always featured prominently in their works.
Before the great social upheavals brought about by urbanisation in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, people’s ties to the natural environment were very strong – much stronger than they are today. But it would be wrong to think that such ties were severed for good, or that the poetic practice just referred to came to an abrupt end or was no longer possible.
Living in the middle of the urban jungle, contemporary writers can still borrow their imagery from nature and use it to good effect. In his famous two-line poem In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound compared the faces of people inside a subway station to petals on the branch of a tree. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: petals on a wet, black bough.”
As these lines show, poets do not limit themselves to describing Nature, they see psychological attitudes and states of mind reflected in it as they project their own moods and emotions onto it.
Iris Murdoch once wrote: “You may know a truth, but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie.”
As is well known, Plato and Aristotle held contrasting views about poetry. While Plato insisted that poets were liars and wanted them banished from his Ideal State, Aristotle defended the claim of poetry to tell the truth.
There were other reasons for their disagreement. While Plato felt that the emotions belonged to the irrational soul and wanted them suppressed, Aristotle saw them as forming an integral part of the personality and considered an emotionless character as not really human at all. For him poets in general, and dramatic poets in particular, played an important role in “directing the mind” to a better understanding of the emotions.
We can learn important truths about ourselves by watching Antigone or by reading Hamlet. In highlighting the role of action in the theatre we must not lose sight of the importance of the poetry; for unless we understand the words, the work loses much of its significance and will not produce its intended effect.
Catharsis or purification has a conceptual component to it. It is by what they say, and not only by what they do, that Oedipus or King Lear reveal their inner turmoil to us. “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!...You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!”
It is the poetry that conveys the rage of the disgraced protagonist in King Lear; and it is the quality of the language, the imagery and the rhythm of the verse that enable him to express his anger and grief at Cordelia’s death with such poignancy and vigour. “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! You are men of stones. Had I your tongue and eyes, I’d use them so/That heaven’s vaults should crack. She’s gone for ever!”
The world is full of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, and our emotions are extremely complex. That complexity, as Martha Nussbaum has emphasised, “cannot be fully and adequately stated in the language of conventional philosophical prose – a style remarkably flat and lacking in wonder – but only in a language and in forms themselves more complex, more allusive, more attentive to particulars” – precisely the language of the poet, the novelist, the artist.
In our search for the truth, in every attempt on our part to understand in some way the world’s infinite variety and the complexity of the emotions, poetry plays a crucial role. Poets widen our perceptual field, they make us look at things in a new light, illuminating important aspects of reality and deepening our knowledge of the human condition. They evoke situations with which we can identify and provide us with images that stimulate fresh thoughts and from which we can learn. Contrary to what Plato claimed, poetry can be – and quite often is – a vehicle for truth.

Prof. Friggieri is head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Malta.

Source: Weekender, March 21, 2009