The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition

Abrams believes that the connection between truth and poetry is established both in poetry itself and in literary criticism. Abrams focuses on the variable definitions of truth, nature, and the connections between these terms in 18th- and 19th-century English thought. Initially, the thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as Hobbes and Hume, insisted that truth in poetry only existed if the poem reflected the natural world. The main poetic subjects that came under fire for being false and misrepresenting nature were supernatural non-Christian subjects, such as Greek and Roman gods in Classical epic poetry, or fairies, ghosts, and witches in lyric and odes. The only exception was for Christian supernatural events taken in large part from biblical tradition.

At the same time, many believed that the purpose of poetry was to provide the reader with pleasure, and readers loved the fantastic in Shakespeare’s fairies, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), and other supernatural images in poetry. The solution, offered in large part by Thomas Twining (1735-1804), was verisimilitude, or a self-consistent representation of the supernatural that conforms to common belief. In other words, a poem could still reflect truth if there were impossibilities described, so long as the poem still echoed the natural real world in its logic.