Does art/poetry create just an imitation of nature?

Art reflexes reality through a subjective mind. It’s true that art can carry some truth in it (really art are based on reality), but it is more “I see this and this is how I think about it” than “I see it and this is exactly what I see”. As for you example, the man can know a bit about justice, but if he wants to study it in depth, he need something more academic.

Art and poetry create an illusion.

Aesthetic development is an important part of maturation. Like an iceberg, rational thinking, problem solving and other cognitive aspects are a small part of the human mind. Fiction, poetry, drawing, painting and sculpturing are outlets for the deeper parts of consciousness. To limit the understanding of “nature/truth/reality” to alleged objective information is to deny the power that subjectivity provides.

Oh, you’re going to make me go deep with this one. I was thinking about your question, and sitting on the back of one of my chairs, studying an impressionist picture I have on the wall of an English cottage garden. I had just put in a CD and Bob Seger’s Against The Wind starts. And it’s like whoa, something just happened. This touched my soul. Not a soul as in religion, but my artistic soul. There’s something good and pure that this touched. It wants me to do good stuff. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but it hit me pretty deeply. I’m going to have to put in some AC/DC or something or I’ll want to watch a Julie Andrews or Shirley Temple flick. :)

Poetry and art may have nothing to do with nature. They are creations and things of beauty each in their own way. We can definitely learn things from them in a way we cannot from books. Sometimes they speak to us on an emotional level.

Art is an emotional or aesthetic response to reality. In order to create the appropriate effect, the artist may distort the physical reality, which would be justified as being needed to uncover a greater truth. An artist may depict an injustice, but it is up to the viewer to, first recognize the injustice as such, and secondly to properly deal with it.

I can’t think of anything less amenable to generalization than art, which is a wonderful thing, really. That’s the source of its vitality. If we could actually pin it down conceptually and define its boundaries, we would be surrendering our own mystery in the bargain.

Where does Nature end and humanity begin? Is there really such a boundary? Art lives in the ambiguous spaciousness that opens up when you refrain from making such a distinction. In our direct experience, is there ever such a thing as Nature as object, devoid of subjectivity? We can entertain conceptually a distinction between subject and object, but in our actual experience there is no such distinction. That fusion of subject and object is the playground of art.