The Poet is a powerful magician, creating visions taken for real (the implications of the figure of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, or Alcandre in Corneille's L'Illusion comique); the Poet is a dangerous liar in society or a hanger-on weaving confidence tricks in the family (Tannegui Lefèvre, 1697; the figure of Trissotin in Molière's Les Femmes Savantes). And the products of his fancy may be wondrous sights, or on the contrary misleading, even dangerous, illusions. These accounts of the work of poets from the classical European tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are not localized there but operate in a long tradition running back to Plato or beyond, and forward to the actual danger run by the author of Satanic Verses. They are one sort of answer to the question of the relation between art and truth, which is really two questions, at least. One: does art proffer objects which can be measured against truth? Does it, for instance, make sense to say of a painting or a poem that it is “true”? And second: what is the status of the imaginary object that is the product of art? When we see the figure of Hamlet on the stage, surely we are not seeing Ralph Fiennes, but somehow a ghostly superimposition of the prince onto the body of the actor?