a defence of poetry

Livy is instinct with poetry. Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world. But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. "A Defence of Poetry" is an essay by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Edward Moxon in London. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso—“Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta” [none but God and the poet deserve the name of Creator—ed.]. Shelley’s conclusion is written very persuasively and without vivid imagery or fictional elements. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art: “Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse” [“Galeotto was the book and the one who wrote it”—ed.]. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. Shelley’s essay contains no rules for poetry, or aesthetic judgments of his contemporaries. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. My problem with deploying a term liek nonelen in these cases is acutually similar to your cirtique of the term ideopigical unamlsing as a too-broad unanuajce interprestive proacdeure. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley discusses the role of poets. Shelley's argument relies heavily on the way he defines his terms. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. Daiches, David. A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight. It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius. To begin, Shelley turns to reason and imagination, defining reason as logical thought and imagination as perception, adding, “reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.” From reason and imagination, man may recognize beauty, and it is through beauty that civilization comes. Written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Edward Moxon in London. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but that ideal perfection and energy which everyone feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. But there is a principle within His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. It is not inasmuch as they were poets, but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. The Provençal Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and superstition. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. <>>> His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no conductor. Those in “excess” of language are the poets, whose task it is to impart the pleasures of their experience and observations into poems. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. At such periods the calculating principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed upon them. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism and superstition. He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. Among Shelley’s closest friends were the other famous Romantic poets of the day, among them John Keats, whose death inspired Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Lord Byron.Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” is unusual compared with similarly titled “defenses” of poetry. iii—Shelley]—and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the store-house of axioms common to all knowledge. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Discusses the Platonic idealism of A Defence of Poetry in terms of poetry and social morality, language and imagination. This assumption then, through Shelley’s own understanding, marks the poet as a prophet, not a man dispensing forecasts but a person who “participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” He goes on to place poetry in the column of divine and organic process: “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth . According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as … Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live. <>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences of these events. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted that form. A single sentence may be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought. And hence the saying, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of mirth.” Not that this highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. In this essay, written a year before his death, Shelley addresses “The Four Ages of Poetry,” a witty magazine piece by his friend, Thomas Love Peacock. An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), by the celebrated soldier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, is the most important work of literary theory published in the Renaissance. For if the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the “Aeneid,” still less can it be conceded to the “Orlando Furioso,” the “Gerusalemme Liberata,” the “Lusiad,” or the “Faerie Queene.”. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is to be imputed. . Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos! Read the excerpt from "A Defence of Poetry." But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay. Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of civil life. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. In Shelley’s immortal essay “A Defence of Poetry’ he writes: “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. [See the “Filum Labyrinthi,” and the “Essay on Death” particularly.—Shelley] His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader’s mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. Calderon, in his religious autos, has attempted to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human passion. .it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred Shelley I. I can readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremist anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonors his conquest in the victor. Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. It is presumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. And Milton’s poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression. You know, to fire up a debate! Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose. This text goes under 2 different titles, "A Defence of Poetry" and "Apology for Poetry." Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driYen, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an .tEolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill [1965] (OCoLC)741859181: Document Type: Book: All Authors / Contributors: Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Emory Jordan; Thomas Love Peacock The Defense of Poetry by P. B. Shelley P. B. Shelley, a great Romantic poet and critic, defends poetry by claiming that the poet creates human values and imagines the forms that shape the social and cultural order Unlike to Peacock, for Shelley, each poetic mind, recreates its own private universe and poets, thus are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility. As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. Language, Shelley contends, shows humanity’s impulse toward order and harmony, which leads to an appreciation of unity and beauty. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the ancient armor or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. You say too musch lie a steamroller when In his poem "Mutability," Shelley a. focuses on the beauty of nature rather than addressing time. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the consciousness or will. We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty itself. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as … Let us examine as the grounds of this distinction what is here meant by utility. It is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their imperfection consists. Hatred ; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect argument relies heavily on the beauty of nature rather than confound and! 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