At a time when the content of the school educational curriculum is subject to exhaustive discussion, teachers of literature may find that they have a special problem in justifying the pursuit of their own discipline. Teachers of other subjects may claim that their own work is of utilitarian value in that it serves as an induction into the nature of the real world, its plants and animals, physical laws, structure, history, ethical and religious codes, and so on. They might add that to investigate these matters is indubitably to engage in educative activity because the result of such investigation is to achieve cognitive knowledge of reality. By definition, only that which is true can be known. An effective educational curriculum is one in which every component discipline contributes an account of reality. The challenge with which the teacher of literature is presented is to show how his discipline can make a contribution to the account of truth afforded by the educational experience of the student. One of his difficulties is that many eminent authorities have represented the study of literature as the pursuit of error rather than the acquisition of truth. Perhaps the best known of the anti-literary polemicists is Plato in The Republic in which he depicts the poets as those who speak out of inspiration rather than knowledge and who are subject to the appearance of an illusory world. Poetry is itself the image of illusions rather than the representation of a real world. It is, therefore, untrue. Plato's attack contrasted the illusory nature of poetic experience with that of the truth provided by philosophy. In sixteenth century England attacks on poetry came most frequently from those concerned to defend religion. Their chief charge against poetry, which has been recorded by Sir Philip Sidney [I], is that it is the 'mother of lies'. In his history of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat recounted how the new scientific philosophy had banished the chimeras and nymphs of old mythology, made miracles redundant and swept away the tropes and figures in which the old stories were told [2]. In the seventeenth century began that growing distinction of 'fact' and 'fiction' familiar to us all. Most statements which appear in novels and plays are about events which never happened and people who did not exist. A novel is, in a sense, an elaborated lie. Nineteenth-century utilitarians would have added that poetry is not merely false, but useless [3]. In discussions concerning the nature of a 'core' curriculum or 'what we should really teach the children' these old attacks from the viewpoints of the philosopher, the religious zealot, the scientist and the economist will be rephrased and renewed. Poetry is neither useful nor true. How, then, can we defend its study in school? In attempting to answer the question, the teacher of literature may choose to repeat any combination of three arguments employed by literary apologists in the history of the dispute. The first of these is considered by Plato in The Protagoras. If poetry is not literally true then it might be regarded as the revelation of deeper truth. Poetry (by this he means