Poetry is Truth

Poor old Aristotle was wrong about most things. He thought the most effective part of rhetoric neither logos (the appeal to reason) nor pathos (the appeal to emotion) but rather ethos: the persuasive force of the speaker's character. Edmund Burke had a similar inkling and he was wrong too. But Burke did better on the Art question. "Art is man's nature, and the essence of humanity is not obscured, but revealed, in the man-made structures of a sophisticated civilization." When the Duke of Richmond declared that he preferred history to poetry because "history is truth," both Burke and Fox disagreed with him: "they thought that poetry was truth, being a representation of human nature." We must thank young Mr. Hitchens, presently still a promising student at Oxford, for relating all this to us.