A Defence of Poetry
Page citations, unless noted otherwise, are from the Broadview Anthology.
The Defence was written Feb-Mar 1821, in response to Peacock's The Four Ages of Poetry (1820):
Then comes the age of brass, which, by rejecting the polish and the learning of the age of silver, and taking a retrograde stride to the barbarisms and crude traditions of the age of iron, professes to return to nature and revive the age of gold. This is the second childhood of poetry.
To some such perversion of intellect we owe that egregious confraternity of rhymesters, known by the name of the Lake Poets.
While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age.
Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society: but for the maturity of mind to make a serious business of the playthings of its childhood, is as absurd as for a full-grown man to rub his gums with coral, and cry to be charmed to sleep by the jingle of silver bells.
Shelley's Defence goes well beyond a response to Peacock. Shelley's letter to Peacock (March 21 1821): "I dispatch by this post the first part of an essay, intended to consist of three parts, which I design for an antidote to your Four Ages of Poetry. You will see that I have taken a more general view of what poetry is than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my positions, without considering your own touched." (Letters, II, 275)
Platonic?
Platonic suggestions: e.g., poetry "lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms" (768).
Plato texts Shelley was reading or translating at this time: Ion, Symposium; but the Defence is not explainable entirely by Platonic ideas; the creative power is within the human mind, which is a type of all minds -- "the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds" (763).
The good, beautiful, Intellectual Beauty, etc., is the source of inspiration. The poet's mind is a portion of the Absolute. He is not inspired by it, he is a part of it. -- "power arises from within" (767). It "creates for us a being within our being" (768). Hence the passivity of the poet's mind, "Man is an instrument. . ." (761).
A poetic form participates in each human art, each "indestructible order" -- music, dance, architecture, etc. (762).
"A principal difficulty in the Defence lies in the extreme broadness of the definition of poetry. . . What does poetry not include?" (Baker 438). [Cf. 762]
The divine within humanity: Wasserman
"Each mind is essentially an equivalent particle of the Absolute, so that the distinction among individual identities is merely nominal, and since all minds, Shelley holds, perform according to the same laws, the mind of the 'creator' -- that is, the poet -- 'is itself the image of all other minds' (763). The poet, then, 'participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one' (762) not because he is transported to or inspired by that transcendent One but because his internal spirit is a portion of it." (Wasserman 205)
Despite images of inspiration elsewhere, "in the Defence he has put aside the religious question of the relation of the individual to the transcendent One and has considered the poet as autonomous, containing the inspiring force mysteriously within himself but outside the boundaries of his understanding." (Wasserman 206)
Cf. "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man" (767) -- not to man.
Considerations:
1. In what context does poetry emerge?
2. What is a poet?
3. What are the formal properties of poetry?
4. What is the effect of poetry for the individual; for society, history?
Baker, John Ross. "Poetry and Language in Shelley's Defence of Poetry." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39.4 (Summer 1981): 437-49.Wasserman, Earl R. Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971.
Document created November 26th 2008 / Revised August 31st 2011