Home › Glossary › Letter T

Truth

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Truth is the quality of being in accord with fact, reality, or authentic experience, though its nature is contested across philosophical traditions.

Detailed Definition
Poetry pursues truth not as factual accuracy but as emotional, existential, or imaginative fidelity. It may embrace paradox, ambiguity, or multiple truths—using metaphor to reveal what logic cannot, making the poem a vessel for lived authenticity.
Example
Example in poetry:
John Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn" declares "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Wallace Stevens’s "The Man with the Blue Guitar" argues poetry must "speak / The true sense of things"; truth appears in Sylvia Plath’s confessional rawness in "Daddy"; Adrienne Rich’s "Diving into the Wreck" seeks historical and personal truth through myth revision; poetic truth in W.S. Merwin is found in silence and what remains unsaid.
Additional Notes
Truth in poetry is not factual but phenomenological, emotional, or imaginative fidelity; Keats’s “beauty is truth” contrasts with Dickinson’s “tell it slant”; students should analyze how poems earn truth through precision, paradox, or vulnerability—recognizing that poetic truth often resides in ambiguity, not certainty.
Also Known As
Veracity Correspondence (in correspondence theory) Aletheia (in Heideggerian contexts) Reality Sat sooth Tattva troth
Skip to main content