The Real Waugh

A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse – indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history.... The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.1 Once upon a time, we used to read novels – Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy – to find out about the way we live now, in Trollope's phrase, or, rather, the way we lived then, and what it means to us now. We tend not to do that any more. We read Diplomatic History, perhaps even undiplomatic history, instead. Seeking to understand how it really was – that peculiar combination of pedantry and knight-errantry suggestive of the scholarly pursuit – we privilege the fact over the fancy, the documentary over the imaginary, the history over the poetry. We show and tell the truth – telling and retelling and retailing while there is some profit in it, as one might say. Perhaps, following Bakan, we need to make a distinction between literal truth and real truth. “There is an old tradition, going back at least to Plato, that there can be a truth in madness, dreaming, poetry, or prophecy, which is higher than literal truth. A metaphor or a fiction might open a door that cannot be opened by approaches that are too weighed down by duty to literal truth.”2 And yet, in our reading and our writing, “fiction” is professionally proscribed. For the scholar, the serious scholar, poetry is at best an indulgence, at worst an excrescence: better the mortification than the ruination of the plump academic flesh. Speilberg's DreamWorks notwithstanding, art barely registers as a source on life

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