Shelley's Defense of Poetry

In February and March 1822, Percy Byssche Shelley untertook his own midterm--as he attempted to understand the place of Poetry in a rapidly changing world that saw current systems of knowledge changing radically.  Sir Thomas Love Peacock--a friend of Shelley's--published an article that urged intelligent men to stop wasting their time writing poetry and apply themselves to the new sciences, including economics and political theory, which would improve the world.  Shelley answered with "Defense of Poetry."

Today, we will split up into groups.  Each group will choose three of the following excerpts from Shelley's Midterm and evaluate its argument.  In other words, interpret what Shelley is saying by putting it in your own words--from the work we have done in this course so far.  A paragraph for each excerpt will suffice.  Be sure to think through Shelley's "Defense" by considering Shim, Aristotle, Sophocles, Classical Theatre, Shakespeare, "The Tragedy of Othello," Renaissance Theatre, "The Tragedy of Orenthal," NBC news, the Tabloids, Restoration Comedy, "The Man of Mode," and so forth.

Each group is responsible for presenting their paragraphs in a round circle session.  Then the class as a whole will evaluate Shelley's "Defense."  What, finally, is poetry?  And how does it relate to us?

1)    Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the Imagination":  and poetry is connate with the origin of man.  Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an AEolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever changing melody.  But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody, alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.  (480)

2)    Their language is virtually metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.  (482)

3)    But Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, 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 and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.

4)    Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stript 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.  (484)

5)    But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. . .  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.  (487)

6)    But Poetry acts in another and diviner manner.  It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.  Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists  The great secret of morals is Love' or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, actions, or person, not our own.  (487)

7)    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, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which sense hardly survives.  (493)