Abstract

Philosophical debates about poetry center on its relation to truth. While even its critics tend to admit that poetry can convey truth, others propose a mode of truthfulness that is distinctly poetic. Phenomenological hermeneutics claims that poetry enacts a form of revealing disclosure, while critical theory promotes poetry predominantly in its illusory character. These positions will be considered against the backdrop of the historical debate and the tension therein between poetry’s mimetic relation to reality and its generation of images and ideas. Poetry both reveals reality and creates ideas in light of possibility, generating alternatives to the real that may be revelatory by contrast. Poetry’s truest disclosures may pertain not so much to the world itself than to the ways we experience and come to know it.