Chapter II

The Sun of Poetic Truth

W

HAT IS the kind of Truth which we can demand from
the spirit of poetry, from the lips of the inspired singer,
or what do we mean when we speak of Truth as one
of the high powers and godheads of his work and of its light
as a diviner sunlight in which he must see and shape from
its burning rays within and around him the flame-stuff of his
creation? We have all our own notions of the Truth and that
gives an ambiguous character to the word and brings in often a
narrow and limited sense of it into our idea of poetry. But first
there is the primary objection, plausible enough if we look only
at the glowing robe and not at the soul of creative expression,
that the poet has nothing at all to do with any other kind of
truth or with Truth at all for her own sake, but is a lover only
of Beauty, she his only worshipped goddess, and not truth but
imagination her winged servant and the radiant messenger of the
Muse. If it cannot absolutely be said that most poetry is most
feigning and the whole art amounts to a power of beautiful
fiction, yet it is apparent that the poet most succeeds when he
takes outward or actual truth only as a first hint and steeps most
subtly whatever crude matter it gives to his mind in the delightful
hues of imagination and transmutes it into the unfettered beauty
of her shapes. That might seem at first sight to mean or so might
be interpreted that truth and art are two unconnected or little
connected things, and if truth is to be made at all the subject-
matter of art, it yet does not become art unless it has come out
transfigured and, it may be, unrecognisable in the imagination’s
characteristic process. But in fact it does not mean that, but
only that art is not an imitation or reproduction of outward
Nature, but rather missioned to give by the aid of a transmuting
faculty something more inwardly true than the external life and
appearance.