An untimely co-occurrence

David Potter, writing on the subject of narrative validity and historiography in the Classics, cites Pliny the Younger recounting a story heard at a dinner party, I trust the person who told it, although what is truth to poets? Still, the person who told the story is one of whom you might think well if you were to write history. (9.33.1, qtd. in Potter 5) Pliny's good-natured remark seems to question the truthfulness of poets while at the same time crediting this particular poet with a kind of cultural reliability. What is poetic truth, anyway? In "Ode on a Grecian Urn" John Keats equates truth with beauty (Ferguson et al. 939). Shelley, of course, famously claims in the last line of A Defence of Poetry that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" (568). In "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William Carlos Williams claims that poetry contains truth essential to our survival: "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there" (Ferguson et al. 1283). Taoists say that "knowledge of Tao lodges in the same part of the mind as poetry," which is why ancient Taoist texts like the Tao te Ching are often written in verse: "There is the same quick perception" (Deng, 365 Tao 63).