According to Wittgenstein, in the remarks collected as Culture and Value , ‘People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them.’ 18th and early 19th century art-lovers would have taken a very different view. Dr. Johnson assumed that the poets had truths to impart, while Hegel insisted that ‘In art we have to do not with any agreeable or useful child's play, (...) but with an unfolding of the truth.’ Though it still exerts a submerged influence, the concept of artistic truth has since sustained hammer-blows both from modernist aestheticism, which divorces art from reality, and from postmodern subjectivism about truth. This article aims to resurrect it, seeking a middle way between Dr. Johnson's didactic concept of art , and the modernist and postmodernist divorce of art from reality. (shrink)

This article begins by noting the tendency of certain academic practices to arrest thought, and attempts to circumvent that arrestation in the writer by reflecting on her adolescent response to the writings of William Wordsworth. It explores the possible implications of a youthful feeling that poetry is ‘true’, tying this in with Wordsworth’s own writing about poetry and truth, and with a particular passage from Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere which once prompted that youthful feeling. The personal and particular sources from (...) which affective responses to poetry are often drawn are noted, and prosody is put forward as one of the most important among these sources, firstly for the present writer and then for Wordsworth himself. It finishes by contemplating the loss of that youthful response to poetry, and the implications of that loss for thinking. (shrink)