The “Lie and Truth” Relationship in Turkish Poetry

Abstract

Art is a work of selection and arrangement. As an artistic design, poetry helps people make sense of life and the World by establishing a dialectic relationship between humans and the world. Aiming to implicate, evoke and suggest, poetry aspires to reach invisible reality based on visible reality. The reality in nature and reality in art are always different from each other. Reality in art is not what is seen, but what is fictionalized. And poetry is an art form that does not tell the truth as it is. Art in general and poetry in particular are an activity that contains mediation in essence. Poetry is a game that aims at narration, but not composed of words only. In this game, poet uses “lie” or “imagery”, an imaginary design, to implicate “reality”. Opening the doors of association in a text to the reader, lie and imagery go beyond the boundaries of language and present a different reality. Ancient Greek philosophers argue that art consists of a fictitious World and imitates reality. For instance, Plato proposes that art is an illusion while Aristo tle asserts that art has a certain value even if it is lie. In literary works, “lie” and “truth” are not opposite of each other. The message intended by poet is hidden in this dialectic relationship between lie and truth. “Lie” in poetic texts, together with imagery as an interpretation of reality, both helps the reader realize the truth, and hide the truth in itself. Serving to implicate and evoke the truth, “lie” can be implicit in imagery. This study describes the dialectic relationship between “lie and truth” in the journey “ in poet’s country and around poetry ” in the context of Turkish poetry.