Written Feb-Mar 1821, in response to Peacock's The Four Ages of Poetry
Synopsis by paragraph numbers:
1. reason vs. imagination
2. mind as passive before impressions, but adjusts to them; evolutionary account: child's pleasure in sounds, expression of social sympathies
3. order or rhythm in representations; poets excel in this; metaphoric relations, following nature; language originally poetry
4. poets as authors and lawgivers of society, religion; prophetic power, universal truths
5. language the product of imagination; poetry the most powerful of arts
7. sound has orderly relation to thought; translation impossible
8. origin of metre; poetry no different from prose; reveals permanent analogies of things
9. story as contingent, poetry as universal truth, especially over time
10. parts of whole may be poetic
12. evaluation of poet needs other poets of all time; underlying, eternal beauty of poetic work;
13. poetry beyond ethics, defamiliarizes; empathy requires imagination
37. too much knowledge: we need to imagine what we know
38. especially needed now with excess of calculating principle
39. poetry the source of knowledge; inspiration as a fading coal; poetry grows organically
40. poetry records best moments of mind; sensibility of poet's mind; makes immortal
41. poetry transmutes, defamiliarizes
42. poetry defamiliarizes, creates a being within
43. poet is the best of men
44. poetry is not willed
48. present age will be memorable for poetry, relation to struggle for liberty; poets are prophetsThomas Love Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), quotations:
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.
Whole text is at: http://www.thomaslovepeacock.net/FourAges.html
Shelley's Defence -- goes well beyond a response to Peacock. Shelley's letter to Peacock (March 21 1821): "I dispatch by this post the 1st Part of an Essay intended to consist of 3 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 is Poetry than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my positions without considering your own touched." (Letters, II, 275)
return to Shelleys course page
Document prepared November 20th 2003