In the many historical definitions of poetry there has always been an antithesis to poetry. Aristotle named history as the opposite of poetry, which eventually moved to a distinction between poetry and its opposite, prose, but in the wake of the Enlightenment, and with the rise of Utilitarianism, poetry was placed in opposition to fact and truth. Utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and James Mill (1773-1836)—the father of John Stuart Mill—wrote that poetry served little to no use to society because it wasn’t strictly true as science and fact are true. However, various thinkers who subscribed to the value of science also saw a value in poetry, which helped change and shape its definition and the discussions surrounding poetry’s creation.

The opposition of science and poetry is treated differently by the primary Romantic poets. Keats lamented Newton’s discovery of the prismatic effects that produce a rainbow in his poem “Lamia,” with Keats arguing that Newton stole the mystery and beauty from the rainbow by explaining it. Abrams argues that Keats commits a fallacy by viewing science as the enemy of poetry. In contrast, Wordsworth believed that science or philosophy and poetry could enhance one another: He believed that while science explains how nature works, poetry expresses the emotional experience of nature’s beauty. Shelley and Coleridge likewise saw poetry and science as the two participants in a marriage, arguing that they could enhance one another.

The split between science and poetry led to attempts by critics and poets to define poetic and scientific truth differently. They often suggested that scientific truth is essentially factual, observable truth, while poetic truth is more amorphous. Abrams provides several summaries of opinions on how poetry is defined as “true” in Romantic thought. He notes that most scholars of the period treated definitions of both poetry and truth with flexibility.

The first conception of poetic truth is that poetry describes or depicts an imagined or sensual world beyond the realistic material world. Blake, Shelley, and the critic Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) all defined poetic truth this way, while Coleridge and Wordsworth made a more stark distinction between imagination or intuition and reason or observation. Keats, who famously wrote in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “beauty is truth, truth beauty” (Line 49), is characterized by Abrams as treating poetic truth as “an attribution of value” (314). In other words, poems exist and reflect a genuine emotional experience which makes poems important.

Wordsworth and Hazlitt described an element of poetic truth as portraying things that demonstrate the emotions and imagination of the poet. The contrasting view—that science only describes two elements of objects while poetry provides the third element—is largely evident in John Stuart Mill, who argues that poetry offers a deeper understanding of reality than pure observational science. Abrams gives the most attention, however, to the concept that poetry is true because it is “sincere” (317). He cites Wordsworth, Keble, and Carlyle who all turned to religion and religiously- oriented poems to describe sincerity as moral and emotional honesty. In later criticism, sincerity lost some of its moral and religious flavor, with poetry’s truth becoming evaluated in terms of how genuinely it expresses a feeling.

John Stuart Mill, and to a lesser extent Wordsworth and Coleridge, provided a different perspective on the relationship of truth to poetry. Instead of discussing poetry as either true or false, Mill argued that poetry’s aim is not to make assertions that can be measured in terms of accuracy or truth, but instead to provide beauty and pleasure, which can’t be evaluated in terms of truth.

The popularity and strength of Utilitarianism in the late 18th century proposes one final issue in Abrams’s investigation of the nature of poetry. Strict Utilitarians like Bentham and James Mill argued that poetry had no specific usefulness and therefore was a waste of time both to read and to write. Kant and Karl Philipp Moritz (1756-1793) argued that poetry’s value was unrelated to its usefulness, as what mattered was poetry’s ability to contemplate beauty as an end in itself. Nineteenth-century French writers and philosophers, as well as Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), believed that a poem was valuable simply because it existed and was beautiful, that art was an end in itself (“art for art’s sake”).

Wordsworth maintained the 18th-century perspective that poetry teaches morality and emotion, but rather than being directly instructive, he believed that poetry brings the reader to a higher plane of feeling and behavior. Shelley similarly argued that poetry models all the positive elements of humanity, and as a result, “teach[es] by moral contagion” (331). Mill and Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), among others, argued that poetry’s focus on the emotions gives it inherent value, as the emotional element of the human mind should not be ignored in preference to the logical or scientific mind.