A Defense of Poetry
Contribution of Shelley to Criticism
- Shelley only spoke about some philosophical assumption of the poetry instead of defining it. Reason: It is a logical thought and it respects the differences. Imagination: It is perception and similitudes of things.
- From reason and imagination, man may recognize beauty, and it is through beauty that civilization comes.
- Language shows humanity’s impulse toward order and harmony, which leads to an appreciation of unity and beauty. Those in “excess” of language are the poets, whose task it is to impart the pleasures of their experience and observations into poems.
- Shelley argues, that civilization advances with the help of poetry. This assumption marks the poet as a prophet, not a man dispensing forecasts but a person who “participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” Shelley’s The Defense of Poetry is a response against the four ages of poetry of peacock.
Definition of Poetry:
- “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth . . . the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator.”
- “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
- Poetry is one of the modes through which the supreme power is revealed.
- 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.
- He says, in the moment of inspiration, the poet reaches the eternal regions and has his materials, and that the poem is a melody emerging from the interaction of the external and internal, and the divine inspiration is poetic.
