On Verisimilitude in Poetry

A derivative consideration of several points I have made before is the question of how representative or true to life an art poetry should be. I consider this a slightly different issue than the very vexed question I have tussled with before of how much poetry should indulge in fiction or transparently represent some form of truth, because this issue is less one of veracity and more one of verisimilitude. In short, how believable should poetry be? How realistic, rather than how real? Should we paint word pictures of that which is, was, and yet may be, or jet off into the realm of the strictly counterfactual, in the sense of that which cannot be true? And as a subset of this question, or a related one, how much should poetry mirror life even as it necessarily distorts it to some degree through artistic license?

Obviously there is a space for the counterfactual, fictive, even fantastic in poetry. As with any other art form, it is in a sense ridiculous to claim to restrict what poetry can or cannot be used, or attempt to be used, to show, represent, or engage with. So this question is not simply whether poetry can be fictional, but occupies a part of that troublesome space which overlaps the questions "should it?" and "how should it engage with reality even after it has passed into fiction?"

I do not expect to find or relate a full answer here, but merely to attempt to move towards one. I believe that poetry ought to engage with the real and remain with the realistic as far as it can while still moving towards its artistic goal; that is, I believe that poetry draws serious force from its connection to the depiction of that which seems to be plausible, realistic, or otherwise connected to reality or truth, and that abandoning that connection should only be done with great care, under conditions of deliberate artistic contemplation, and subject to an awareness of how severing that connection affects the poem and its effects.

This does not mean no fiction, only a retention of the link back to an imaginatively plausible reality behind the fiction. The situation and expression should, as far as possible within artistic limits, be and remain within the limits of what can be translated by a receiving mind as part of a potential truth, whether or not they are so, since this will I believe produce superior - as in more powerful, more moving, more affective and effective - effects. Absurdism and surrealism do have an artistic place, of course, but I believe the points where such a place is warranted and located are few and must be carefully chosen. As a general rule, poetry should attempt to maintain the appearance of a possible link to reality, or to plausibility within a given set of circumstances.

It is this latter condition which for me incorporates fantasies like, to step outside of sonnets alone, John Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." This is implausible in a strict sense, but within the world conditions set up in the poem, merely weird, not surreal. It establishes a world, and is internally consistent within that world; what is more, one can see how people are still people in that world. The plausibility arises from the thought that in those - admittedly fantastic - circumstances, one could conceive of a normal actor acting in those ways. The setting is fantastic, but within it the action is not.

The issue of how exactly to walk this tightrope of imagined plausibility is one for another time, but the issue of whether to do so is the one I wished to raise here. I believe poetry is most often more empowered to affect the reader where plausibility within circumstances is maintained. Further, I believe that maintaining that link to plausible reality ought to be the default, with deviations from it justified by careful thought, rather than the other way around.