I've been rereading Virginia Woolf's
Orlando, and it has rather more to say about poetry, art, and literature than I remember (I think the gender-bending stuck with me the first time). Here is Orlando thinking about poetry, and the (in)ability of words to describe reality or truth:
'... Why not simply say what one means and leave it?'
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. 'The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said ... 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.' And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.
Perhaps
deep dejection is the only proper response to these problems. Maybe language will never get us any closer to truth. Maybe poetry isn't even trying to do that anymore.
Some poets have thought the answer is to stop trying to describe truth with language, but instead to use language for its own ends; still, I think a lot of those experiments have been taken as far as they can go into abstraction, noise, nothingness. I read an interesting post on the Buffalo poetics list recently talking about how language poetics needs to move from post-modernism to a kind of mannerism. It was an interesting proposal, and perhaps an idea whose time has come.
