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A Defense of Poetry (Shelley)
A Defense of Poetry (Shelley)
collectioi
public library
kansas city,
missouri
STACKS REF 821 S545d
Shelley, Percy Bysshe,
1792-1822. en
A. defence of poetry,
[1904]
A DEFENCE OF POETRY
A DEFENCE
OF POETRY
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
EDITED BY MRS. SHELLEY
REPRINTED FROM THE
EDITION OF MDCCCXLV
PNI03
. Sfc
8
A Defence of Poetry
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
ADEFENCE
OF POETRY
CCORDING
TO ONE MO
DE OF RE-
CARDING *s
THOSE TWO
CLASSES OF
MENTAL AC
TFHWHICH
ARE CALLED
reason and imagination, the former
may be considered as mind contem-
plating the relations borne by one
thought to another, however produced;
and the latter, as mind acting upon
those thoughts so as to colour them
with its own light, and composing from
them, as from elements, other thoughts,
each containing within itself the princi-
ple of its
own integrity. The one is the
16 or the principle of synthesis,
jiouiiv,
language is
vitally metaphorical; that
marks the before unapprehended
is, it
18
of a cyclic poem: the copiousness o
lexicography and the distinctions of
grammar are the works of a later age,
and are merely the catalogue and the
form of the creations 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 archi-
tecture, 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 pro-
pinquity with the beautiful and the
true, that partial apprehension of the
27
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 par-
ticular facts, stripped of the poetry
which should invest them, augments
that of poetry, and for ever develops
new and wonderful applications of the
eternal truth which it contains. Hence
epitomes have been called the moths
of just history; they eat out the poetry
of it. 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.
The parts of a composition may be
poetical,without the composition as
a whole being a poem. single sen-A
tence 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 thus
all the great historians, Herodotus,
Plutarch, Livy, were poets; and
although the plan of these writers,
especially that of Livy, restrained them
from developing this faculty in its
highest degree, they made copious and
ample amends for their subjection, by
filling all the interstices of their sub-
jects with living images.
Having determined what is poetry,
and who are poets, let us proceed to
estimate its effects upon society.
Poetry is ever accompanied with
pleasure: all spirits upon which it falls
50
perfectly saturatedwith the poetical
element. The Romans appear to have
considered the Greeks as the selectest
treasuries of the selectest forms of
manners and of nature, and to have
abstained from creating in measured
language, sculpture, music, or archi-
tecture, anything which might bear a
particular relation
to their own condi-
should bear a general one
tion, whilst it
to the universal constitution of the
world. But we judge from partial evi-
dence, and we
judge perhaps partially.
Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius,
all
great poets, have been lost.
Lucre-
tius is in the highest, and Virgil in a
very high sense, a creator. The chosen
delicacy of expressions of the latter,
are as a mist of light which conceal
from us the intense and exceeding
truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy
is with poetry. Yet Horace,
instinct
Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other
great writers of the Virgilian age,
saw man and nature in the mirror of
Greece. The institutions also, and the
religion of Rome, were less poetical
than those of Greece, as the shadow
is less vivid than the substance. Hence
poetry in Rome seemed to follow,
rather than accompany, the perfection
of political and domestic society. The
true poetry of Rome lived in its insti-
whatever of beautiful, true,
tutions; for
and majestic, they contained, could
have sprung only from the faculty
which creates the order in which they
consist. The life of Camillus, the death
of Regulus; the expectation of the sen-
ators, in their godlike state, of the
victorious Gauls; the refusal of the
republic to make peace with Hanni-
bal, after the battle of Cannae, were
not the consequences of a refined cal-
culation of the probable personal ad-
vantage to result from such a rhythm
and order in the shows of life, to those
who were at once the poets and the
actors of these immortal dramas. The
imagination beholding the beauty of
5*
this order, created out of itself accor-
it
70
highest sense; the definition involving
a number of apparent paradoxes. For,
from an inexplicable defect of harmo-
ny in the constitution of human nature,
the pain of the inferior is frequently
connected with the pleasures of the
superior portions of our being. Sorrow,
terror, anguish, despair itself, are often
the chosen expressions of an approxi-
mation to the highest good. Our sym-
pathy in tragic fiction depends on this
+
Although Rousseau has been thus
classed, he was essentially a poet. The
others, even Voltaire, were mere
reasoners.
7*
been congratulating each other on the
abolition of the Inquisition in Spain.
But it exceeds all imagination to con-
ceive what would have been the moral
condition of the world if neither Dante,
Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shake-
speare, 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 had never taken
literature
tity
of the power of assimilating them
to the internal laws of human nature.
The body has then become too unwieldy
for that which animates it.
78
dise Lost as a whole before he execu-
ted in portions.
it We have his own
authority also for the muse having
him the "unpremeditated
"dictated" to
song/' And let this be an answer to
those who would allege the fifty-six
various readings of the first line of the
Orlando Furioso. Compositions so
produced are to poetry what mosaic is
to painting* This instinct and intuition
of the poetical faculty is still more ob-
servable in the plastic and pictorial
arts; a great statue or picture grows
under the power of the artist as a child
in the mother's womb; and the very
mind which directs the hands in form-
ation incapable of accounting to itself
is
90
This copy of "A Defence of Poetry"
is one of an edition of 500 copies
printed on French Hand-made paper
and 8 on Imperial Japan Vellum at the
press of Geo. F. McKiernan 6i Co., in
Chicago: after which the type has been
distributed. Designed by and printed
under the supervision of Ralph Fletcher
Seymour for the Publishers, The
Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis.
a
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