David Lehner

Poets are not liars; poetry and lying are separate activities. But poets have certainly been accused of being liars, and this was by no means a trifling allegation. In this work, I try to take seriously this charge against the poets in order to see what kind of critical yield it produces. Specifically, I investigate the similarities between the linguistic structure of the lie and the inward activities of the poem. The distinctive feature of my approach is that I work out for the first time the linguistic conditions of the lie and then use this model to elucidate the mental and linguistic processes involved in the creation of poems and fictional narratives. I trace the idea of the poet as liar through Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, DeFoe, Swift, Coleridge, Wilde, and Orwell, as well as contemporary theorists such as Frye, Bloom, de Man, and Derrida. By synthesizing the ideas of these writers, I develop a definition of the poet as liar that proceeds, one might say, from genus to species: in the first part of the work, I show how poems and lies are alike in seven important respects; in the second part, I distinguish poetry from lying in regard to five specific capacities and techniques: Imagination, Narration, Metaphor, Allegory, and Literary Self-Reference. My main emphasis throughout is not to argue that the poet actually is a liar, but rather that to consider the poet hypothetically as a liar affords us a new perspective on the dynamics of literary creation.