Veracity in Poetry and Literary Criticism: Some Inter-disciplinary Musings

Abstract

Truth is an inter-disciplinarily contested topic. And the first two disciplines to contest on it were poetry and philosophy. Rather, philosophical and critical commentaries began debating on truth while poetry assumed that its representation of the world whether religious, spiritual or secular was true. And yet poetry – short-hand term for literature – has been accused of pedalling lies on the grounds of non-correspondence with the real world or lacking any hard empirical evidence. Then there is of course the rhetoricity of truth in literature where the objections are – for example, with, say, a line like Wordsworth’s ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’ the only real communication would be that it is evening and not any other time of the day, the other attached adjectives forming mere extra baggage – that many literary expressions further only some sort of vague and subjective surplusage pandering as aestheticism. This working paper would attempt to look at the supposed impingement by poetry on other disciplines of knowledge, and how vis-à-vis disciplines of knowledge like science, poetry (rather, criticism, defending poetry) always had to offer explanations of its teleology.