28 pages • 56 minutes read
Percy Bysshe ShelleyA Defence of Poetry
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1840A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Poetry Is Moral
Shelley argues that poetry produces good morals. He does not mean this in a didactic sense; rather, poetry generates good morality through imagination and delight. It is designed to take a reader outside of their own mind and put them in someone else’s shoes: “It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought” (17). Poetry engages the mind by introducing new ways of thinking. Therefore, it does not narrow the mindset; it enlarges it by encompassing new ideas.
Although poetry does not moralize directly, Shelley says the idea of poetry is the idea of taking a person outside of themselves to see beauty, which produces goodness: “[t]he great instrument of moral good is the imagination” (17). When he writes about morality, he does not refer to a list of what the poet believes is right and wrong. To Shelley, morality is a universal truth. Ascribing only to the morals of one’s time is dangerous because society’s morals change, whereas the morality of poetry is constant. He calls out a few poets for attempting to overtly moralize, saying they failed in both their goals of creating good poetry and affecting moral good: “[T]he effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose” (18).
Shelley asserts that poetry strengthens the morally good feelings and disarms the bad ones, which makes it moral. Although Shelley claimed to be atheistic at some points in his life, through this idea of universal truth, he reveals that he believes in some divine being or idea because he regards poetry as a divine calling.
Humanity Needs Poetry
At the heart of “A Defence of Poetry” is the idea that humanity needs poetry. Shelley says that from the earliest time, humanity delighted in art because art and poetry were divine gifts. Shelley argues that poetry has safeguarded humanity and helped language progress for centuries. He likens original language to chaos and its cyclicality to a poem. Since grammar and lexicography were added to language later, poets were integral in facilitating the creation and origin of language and society:
Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order [of language], 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 (8).
Poets helped society develop language and thus everything else that spawns from the creation of language.
Poetry deals with the present society, but Shelley says poets also forecast the future, which helps society develop: “[The poet] not only beholds intensely the present as it is, […] but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time” (9).
In the second half of “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley discusses how poetry facilitates the development of civilization by returning to the beginning of Western history, giving concrete examples of how poetry safeguarded and advanced humanity. In ancient Greece, Homer “embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character” (15). Through his poems and dramas, Homer manifested the qualities of friendship, patriotism, and devotion which were immortalized as a guide for what is important to humanity. Then, with the advent of Athenian poetry and drama, crime went down because seeing the drama unfold on stage strengthened the good emotions and tamped down the bad ones: “[E]ven crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies of nature” (22). Through his examples of Homer and Athenian drama, Shelley argues that poetry helped civilization advance, and the Romans then preserved these ideals, which endured to the present day.
Ultimately, Shelley argues that poetry brings pleasure, which stands against social corruption and the destruction of all pleasure. Poetry, a work of imagination, is in stark contrast to corruption because, so long as there are works of imagination, then corruption cannot overtake a society: “But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease” (26). Thus, Shelley concludes that poetry stands in the way of complete and utter societal corruption.
Imagination Is Greater Than Reason
Shelley reacts against some ideals of the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Instead of making reason the sum of all things and man’s greatest accomplishment, Shelley says imagination is greater than reason. He defines reason as the pondering of things already known, while imagination goes beyond the known: “Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole” (5). Although reason is necessary for imagination, imagination uses reason to create greater things: “Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance” (5). Without reason, imagination would not be possible, but if reason is an instrument for the imagination, this makes reason subject to it. This idea ties into poetry because, according to Shelley, poetry “is the expression of the imagination” (5).
The distinction between reason and imagination is the first thing Shelley writes about in “A Defence of Poetry.” In his first sentence, he describes two classes of mental action: reason and imagination. Shelley feels this is important because one must distinguish between the two ideas to expose the importance of imagination.
Imagination also comprises the building blocks of language, Shelley argues. A person cannot reason their way into language because it is created by the imagination: “For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone” (10). Another reason imagination is greater is that imagination allows humans to feel empathy. One cannot reason their way into empathy, but they can imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes to feel compassion: “The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that which they are conceived” (23). Thus, imagination creates a better society: “For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure: and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core” (27). According to Shelley, imagination stands against the ideas of corruption, not reason. Revolutions begin with imagination, as revolutionaries imagine a different society and dare to believe things can be different.
In Shelley’s view, the Age of Enlightenment placed too much emphasis on reason. Poets, who had long been influential on society, were pushed aside for reason and mechanists because reason was more practically useful to society. Shelley points out that humanity has more moral, political, and historical wisdom, and more scientific and economical knowledge, than it knows what to do with (43). But this knowledge enslaves the mind into thinking certain processes are true. Imagination, on the other hand, sets the mind free: “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life” (44). By Shelley’s calculation, if poetry is imagination, and imagination is life, then poetry is greater than reason.
Related Titles
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
