I'm guessing that most poets get that feeling, that warming of the heart, that rush of something, when they feel they have written something that's worth saying, something profound even.

What you've done, usually, is expressed a poetic truth...something that goes much deeper than a description of reality.

It is often said that in writing a poem you should "show not tell" and that's broadly right.

Beneath every reality, however grim, however unjust, however beautiful even, is a poetic truth. Sometimes it is only a poetically expressed (and often strange) phrase that can get to the most profound truth, of, for that matter, that can convey the most moving expression of emotion.

I was thinking about this while chatting to a non-poet friend about a piece I wrote recently, and that I've just posted, called 'Backstrets of our heart, bedrock of our identity'. That poem is basically about the largely unappreciated beauty of English red-brick terraced homes; how lovely they were / are. My friend thought I hadn't described in enough details what is so special aboiut terraced streets. Maybe he is right.

But actually, what I wanted the poem to do was go to the poetic truth about red-brick terraced houses ...that they helped form our personalities and cultural identity and that they have symbolic importance in our lives. (Well, in my life, anyway.)

I dunno, maybe I'm going into this too deeply, but whaddaya think, guys?

Poetic truth - does it exist? Is it worth striving for?

Is 'poetic truth' not just periphrasis? A sort of aesthetically pleasing beating around the bush?

I'm not sure if 'gritty reality' and 'poetic truth' are always mutually exclusive. Some of my favourite poems are fairly direct, almost expositional (telling). I'm thinking of Larkin's 'This Be the Verse' or Clare's 'I am'. They are profound while at the same time straight to the point.

'Poetic truth' is the bush meat found in the forest of the night, as Eric 'Blakey' Cantona (or was that Kerry 'mums go' Katona?) might say.

Welcome back Moxy
breaking all rules with glee and
weaponed sillyness!

Crikey, you do know how to make a gal self-conscious, King Paul. But thank you. Has Mr Togher installed a window box? Or is the lady he's posted there blowing a sourgum bubble? Or is it the first awakening of a balloon animal which he will then install in the forest of the night?

'No man can think , write or speak from the heart, but he must intend the TRUTH. Thus all sects of philosophy are from the poetic genius adapted to the weaknesses of the individual', said Mr. Blake. Poets -- such as Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, E. B. Browning and Tennyson -- saw it as their social responsibility to act as the vates poet, and take a subjective world view which stripped theological, literary and philosophical texts of the jejune and extract eternal truths, which would construct the grand narrative of emancipation and build the New Jerusalem. However, they were aware, as the Blake quote shows, that the TRUTH was ineffable, because of the arbitrary nature of language. Therefore, the TRUTH cannot be conveyed in language. TRUTH, then, is unattainable.

Reality, on the other hand, and the shared human experience of the brutality of existence, and the human inability to truly comprehend the environment that surrounds us, can be conveyed in arbitrary language, because the very structure of language and our attempts to understand it are a metaphor for our relationship with the world. The Anglo-Saxon and Norse poets understood this, as did John Skelton and Hopkins. I would argue that REALITY should be prioritized over TRUTH, especially as looking for TRUTH in twentieth century texts would involve engaging with some very unsavory philosophers and writers.