A Defence of Poetry

“But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.”

Shelley speaks to the heart of his piece in saying that poets are more than just writers; they are creators of civilization. He appeals to emotion and asks readers to think about poets in a new way. This quote anticipates the work’s most famous quote, which casts poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (54).

“Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonyme of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone.”

Shelley gives his narrow, specific definition of poetry. Earlier, he broadened his definition to include all works of imagination, but here he says that traditional poetry primarily involves language. He contrasts it with his earlier definition of poetry as all works of the imagination.

“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. 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. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains.”

Shelley uses metaphor to say a poem is an image of eternal truth. He contrasts poetry with storytelling, which he dismisses as a mere collection of facts connected by time and place. Poetry, on the other hand, transcends any specific time or place to capture universal, everlasting truths.

“A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

This quote is an example of metaphor and contrast. Shelley metaphorically says stories and poetry are both mirrors. However, stories distort images, while poetry makes them beautiful.

“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”

Shelley uses metaphor to describe poets as nightingales. Although they are unseen, they spread their music to everyone. The poet is not meant to be seen, but his affect is supposed to move people without them knowing why.

“But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists.”

Shelley endows poetry with a sense of agency. For example, he says that poetry expands the mind and unveils the beauty of the world. Interestingly, he credits “poetry” with these achievements, not the “poets.”

“Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”

Shelley uses metaphor to describe poetry as a sword. The sword cannot be contained, though people try. The same is true for poetry.

“The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. 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 pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food.”

Shelley appeals to emotion by writing that the secret to life is love. Poetry uses imagination to remind humanity of this. In a more ominous turn of phrase, Shelley then refers to the cascade of thoughts in the imagination as a “void,” greedily devouring new experiences.

“But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.”

Shelley compares poets and philosophers to those that would espouse reason. He writes that the effect on the world would be unimaginable without the work of great poets. However, he believes the world would be fine without the work of reasoners.

“Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.”

Shelley uses an analogy involving roots, blossoms, and spring to convey the power of poetry. If the physical elements that make up a rose are like science and reason, then the rose’s odor and color are like poetry. Moreover, poetry is the root of all other good things in life.

“Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.’ The greatest poet even can not 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 colour 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. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.”

Shelley contrasts the process of writing poetry with reason. While a person can choose to be rational or scientific, they cannot choose to write poetry. This contrast shows that Shelley believes poetry is a divine calling.

“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. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.”

Shelley writes that poetry is still beautiful even when used to describe something horrific or somber. He also shows here that he possesses no illusions about the dark realities of human existence. For example, Shelley refers to “the poisonous waters which flow from death through life.”

“A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. 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. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule.”

Shelley uses persuasion and logic to try to bring readers around to his opinion. Because a poet is the author of wisdom and pleasure, then they should be the best of humanity. His use of logic here is a syllogism, a form of reasoning in which a conclusion follows from one or more premises. Because poets create good things, Shelley writes, then it logically follows that they would be the happiest individuals.