Heather McHugh: Tell Me True: Mirrors and Misgivings (July 2000)

Heather McHugh interrogates the idea that art is mimetic, a mirror of the world. Beginning with the Platonic hierarchy but surveying, too, philosophy from Richard Rorty to Derrida, McHugh shows that the idea of art as a mirror has become accepted convention. But poetry also “seeks the immeasurable,” she says, and shows, through close readings of poems by Louise Bogan, Robert Graves, Elizabeth Bishop, and Yeats how poems can create multiple readings, and “break out of the mirror’s stronghold.”