Poetry and lying

Poetry and lying have an innate affinity. Without the liar’s imagination and powers of invention, without his willingness to disregard the facts in search of certain effects, poetry would not exist, nor would prose fiction. An original relationship between lying and poetry becomes a way of affirming the primacy of invention and imagination as essential components of art, and poetry is art. It simultaneously raises questions about art’s ethical status. Like Vladimir Nabokov proposed, the connection between a liar and a poet is as old as poetry itself.

The fact

that poetry has certain truth-telling functions, need not mean however that poetry is accepted exclusively in all ways as true. Recent theoretical work on fiction argues that a fictional status is by no means incompatible with the truth-conveying functions performed by poetry. This is especially true for archaic poetry.