Seems Legit

      Saying that something has verisimilitude is basically saying that it seems legit. Verisimilitude is a piece's resemblance to reality, the extent to which it appears plausible. Now, trying to find Verisimilitude in a smaller piece, like a poem, is quite hard. There isn't anything that really happens to say seems like the truth. Often, the subject matter of poems are quite abstract and this also takes away from any sense of reality.

 In "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Hughes claims to have been an active participant in the history, saying things like "I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it." Through the allusion to the pyramid, the piece fosters a sense of truthfulness and a similarity to reality but I still don't feel that it has verisimilitude. However, in The Things They Carried, O'Brien is able to achieve Verisimilitude. The detail with which he tells the story makes it seem true, especially when he describes the man that O'Brien killed. The details are so horrifying and anatomically correct that it must be true. But with poetry, you don't get a chance to see the detail that really sells a piece.

 So, this week I was watching The Big Bang Theory with my parents and my Dad paused the TV and it landed onto a picture of Sheldon standing next to a board with chemical equations and I noticed something pretty awesome. Written on the board were chemicals that displayed what I believe is Alpha Decay and to my surprise, the equation was correctly written with a superscript to the left of the chemical symbol displaying the atomic mass and a subscript with the atomic number. That small detail added so much to the experience of watching the show and made the show seem like the truth.

 Another great example of Verisimilitude is found in the Lord of the Rings saga and The Hobbit. This weekend, I saw the second hobbit movie and thought that it displayed verisimilitude as well. The Universe is so flushed out and so developed that it seems like another world. In the movie, we can see the effects of actions that happened long ago and how it changed cultures. Thorin, for example, still holds a grudge against the elves for abandoning his people long ago and the people of Lake-Town are still fearful that Smaug may come and destroy their town. Even though The Hobbit is about dwarves and elves and all that junk, it still feels like another reality as the characters act like people. They are just as irrational and helpless as regular people and interact realistically with one another(Except for Legolas who is so good at fighting in the movie that it seems like he is cheating. In one scene he is standing on two barrels in a fast-moving river and firing arrows at the orcs and he doesn't miss a single shot in the entire movie. It's absolutely disgusting but in a good way. ) Verisimilitude is not found in the big ideas that poems consist of but in the little details that make the piece seem real.