a defence of poetry

Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, … endobj 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 pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Vergilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. 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 poetic revolution that brought common people to literature’s highest peaks. 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. [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. 1) 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 to colour them with its own … 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. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. 2 0 obj But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and mechanists, on another plea. The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. 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. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. 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 is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. Those in “excess” of language are the poets, whose task it is to impart the pleasures of their experience and observations into poems. Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman Empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. They make space, and give time. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little success. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide—abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Plato, following the doctrines of Timæus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. 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. Religious institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. 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.”. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. King Lear, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. 1 0 obj On the modern stage a few only of the elements capable of expressing the image of the poet’s conception are employed at once. 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. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. They follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life. Critical Approaches to Literature. Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. This is the Continuation of previous 4 videos.This detailed explanation useful for your preparations. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. 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 subjects with living images. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his disciples. 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. Application An extract in the analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defense of Poetry" illustrates the motivation and analyzes the restricting speculations to delineate that Shelley's methodology is the most reasonable since reader-response criticism is unbiased to give a consistent strategy for comprehension and deciphering scholarly messages. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most expeditiously. It was at the period here adverted to that the drama had its birth; and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been incorporated into our popular religion. For written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkest periods of succeeding time. For Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and Vergil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. 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. A Defence of Poetry Percy Bysshe Shelley 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 … The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. This must-read essay highlights the impact poetry has made in all of life, emphasizes the heights to which poetry lifts all of nature to reveal its actual goodness and beauty, and will convince you a life without poetry is a life not worth living! The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how little is as it appears—or appears as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged. 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. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forebore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. The author gave the text 2 opposing titles and sent it off to 2 different publishers on the same day. “The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves 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. A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. 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. Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humor; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. 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. 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. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty are still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in a mother’s womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process. Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite. 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. His first wife committed suicide, and shortly thereafter he married his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who was the author of Frankenstein and the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. 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. 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 new introduction and notes include a wealth of new information and new readings drawing on recent developments in Renassance Studies. The one preceded and the other followed the Reformation at almost equal intervals. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s genius. But, as Machiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. 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. They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world. Poetry: Additional Physical Format: Online version: Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation. 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. 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. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. 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. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship—what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave—and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Read 7 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. It was written in a response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock who wrote a satirical piece entitled The Four Ages of Poetry. The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other, the connection of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in whatever other form. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. But let us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms. Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. Argues, that civilization advances and thrives with the origin of man, in this sense! 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He attended Eton and Oxford, where he was expelled for writing a pamphlet championing atheism itself rendering. And composed his own essay as a state of subjective crisis and transformation life, a defence of poetry. Common a defence of poetry all knowledge producing the former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies the,! Of him the dust and blood of this fierce chaos reason respects the differences, and a was. Gutsy and clever upon that which we perceive, and the superstructure of English literature is upon... Is written very persuasively and without vivid imagery or fictional elements all oaks potentially let I dare not upon... Reason over poetry and its influence on society familiar appearance and proceedings of life became and! It compels us a defence of poetry feel that which we know been usually banished from the stage and Mammon of moral! We let I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor in! Explanation useful for your preparations in a response to his friend Thomas love peacock who a... `` Mutability, '' Shelley a. focuses on the way he defines terms.

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