Themes The Heroic, Visionary Role of the Poet In Shelleys poetry, the figure of the poet (and, to some

extent, the figure of Shelley himself) is not simply a talented entertainer or even a perceptive moralist but a grand, tragic, prophetic hero. The poet has a deep, mystic appreciation for nature, as in the poem To Wordsworth (1816), and this intense connection with the natural world gives him access to profound cosmic truths, as in Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude ( 1816). He has the powerand the dutyto translate these truths, through the use of his imagination, into poetry, but only a kind of poetry that the public can understand. Thus, his poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and through his words, a poet has the ability to change the world for the better and to bring about political, social, and spiritual change. Shelleys poet is a near-divine savior, comparable to Prometheus, who stole divine fire and gave it to humans in Greek mythology, and to Christ. Like Prometheus and Christ, figures of the poets in Shelleys work are often doomed to suffer: because their visionary power isolates them from other men, because they are misunderstood by critics, because they are persecuted by a tyrannical government, or because they are suffocated by conventional religion and middle-class values. In the end, however, the poet triumphs because his art is immortal, outlasting the tyranny of government, religion, and society and living on to inspire new generations. Like many of the romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, Shelley demonstrates a great reverence for the beauty of nature, and he feels closely connected to natures power. In his early poetry, Shelley shares the romantic interest in pantheismthe belief that God, or a divine, unifying spirit, runs through everything in the universe. He refers to this unifying natural force in many poems, describing it as the spirit of beauty in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and identifying it with Mont Blanc and the Arve River in Mont Blanc. This force is the c ause of all human joy, faith, goodness, and pleasure, and it is also the source of poetic inspiration and divine truth. Shelley asserts several times that this force can influence people to change the world for the better. However, Shelley simultaneously recognizes that natures power is not wholly positive. Nature destroys as often as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and indiscriminately. For this reason, Shelleys delight in nature is mitigated by an awareness of its dark side. The Power of the Human Mind Shelley uses nature as his primary source of poetic inspiration. In such poems as The Mask of Anarchy Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester (1819) and Ode to the West Wind, Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a sublime power over his imagination. This power seems to come from a stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for natures beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power over Shelley because it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination has creative power over nature. It is the imaginationor our ability to form sensory perceptionsthat allows us to describe nature in different, original ways, which help to shape how nature appears and, therefore, how it exists. Thus, the power of the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature, and the experience of beauty in the natural world becomes a kind of collaboration between the perceiver and the perceived. Because Shelley cannot be sure that the sublime powers he senses in nature are only the result of his gifted imagination, he finds it difficult to attribute natures power to God: the human role in shaping nature damages Shelleys ability to believe that natures beauty comes solely from a divine source. Motifs Autumn Shelley sets many of his poems in autumn, including Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Ode to the West Wind. Fall is a time of beauty and death, and so it shows both the creative and destructive powers of nature, a favorite Shelley theme. As a time of change, autumn is a fitting backdrop for Shelleys vision of political and social revolution. In Ode to the West Wind, autumns brilliant colors and violent winds emphasize the passionate, intense nature of the poet, while the decay and death inherent in the season suggest the sacrifice and martyrdom of the Christ-like poet. Ghosts and Spirits

Shelleys interest in the supernatural repeatedly appears in his work. The ghosts and spirits in his poems suggest the possibility of glimpsing a world beyond the one in which we live. In Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, the speaker searches for ghosts and explains that ghosts are one of the ways men have tried to interpret the world beyond. The speaker of Mont Blanc encounters ghosts and shadows of real natural objects in the cave of Poesy. Ghosts are inadequate in both poems: the speaker finds no ghosts in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and the ghosts of Poesy in Mont Blanc are not the real thing, a discovery that emphasizes the elusiveness and myste ry of supernatural forces. Christ From his days at Oxford, Shelley felt deeply doubtful about organized religion, particularly Christianity. Yet, in his poetry, he often represents the poet as a Christ-like figure and thus sets the poet up as a secular replacement for Christ. Martyred by society and conventional values, the Christ figure is resurrected by the power of nature and his own imagination and spreads his prophetic visions over the earth. Shelley further separates his Christ figures from traditional Christian values in Adonais, in which he compares the same character to Christ, as well as Cain, whom the Bible portrays as the worlds first murderer. For Shelley, Christ and Cain are both outcasts and rebels, like romantic poets and like himself. For Shelley, Mont Blancthe highest peak in the Alpsrepresents the eternal power of nature. Mont Blanc has existed forever, and it will last forever, an idea he explores in Mont Blanc. The mountain fills the poet with inspiration, but its coldness and inaccessibility are terrifying. Ultimately, though, Shelley wonders if the mountains power might be meaningless, an invention of the more powerful human imagination. The West Wind Shelley uses the West Wind to symbolize the power of nature and of the imagination inspired by nature. Unlike Mont Blanc, however, the West Wind is active and dynamic in poems, such as Ode to the West Wind. While Mont Blanc is immobile, the West Wind is an agent for change. Even as it destroys, the wind encourages new life on earth and social progress among humanity. The Statue of Ozymandias In Shelleys work, the statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, or Ozymandias, symbolizes political tyranny. In Ozymandias, (1817) the statue is broken into pieces and stranded in an empty desert, which suggests that tyranny is temporary and also that no political leader, particularly an unjust one, can hope to have lasting power or real influence. The broken monument also represents the decay of civilization and culture: the statue is, after all, a human construction, a piece of art made by a creator, and now it and its creatorhave been destroyed, as all living things are eventually destroyed.

A Defence of Poetry is an essay by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840) [1839]. It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". It was written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock's article The Four Ages of Poetry which had been published in 1820. also his own publishers): I am enchanted with your Literary Miscellany, although the last article has excited my polemical faculties so violently that the moment I get rid of my ophthalmia, I mean to set about an answer to it. . . . It is very clever, but I think, very false.' To Peacock Shelley wrote:
[2] [1]

Shelley wrote to the publishers Charles and James Ollier (who were

Your anathemas against poetry itself excited me to a sacred rage. . . . I had the greatest possible desire to break a lance with you . . . in honour of my mistress Urania. A Defence of Poetry was eventually published, with some edits by John Hunt, posthumously by Shelley's wife Mary Shelley in 1840.

In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley argued that the invention of language reveals a human impulse to reproduce the rhythmic and ordered, so that harmony and unity are delighted in wherever they are found and incorporated, instinctively, into creative activities: Every man in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which highest delight results... This faculty of approximation enables the observer to experience the beautiful, by establishing a relation between the highest pleasure and its causes. Those who possess this faculty in excess are poets and their task is to communicate the pleasure of their experiences to the community. Shelley does not claim language is poetry on the grounds that language is the medium of poetry; rather he recognizes in the creation of language an adherence to the poetic precepts of order, harmony, unity, and a desire to express delight in the beautiful. Aesthetic admiration of the true and the beautiful is provided with an important social aspect which extends beyond communication and precipitates self-awareness. Poetry and the various modes of art it incorporates are directly involved with the social activities of life. For Shelley, poets...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... Social and linguistic order are not the sole products of the rational faculty, as language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination and reveals the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension of a higher beauty and truth. In short, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".
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The Defense of Poetry Written in 1820 and not published until 1940, it was Shelleys attempt to understand the place of poetry in a world that is rapidly changing (Vanderbilt par 1). It was written in a response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock who wrote a satirical piece entitled The Four Ages of Poetry. Peacock 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 (Vanderbilt par 1). Of course Shelley had to respond and this is where his defense of poetry took affect. In The Defense of Poetry Shelley argues for poetrys utilitarian function. He contends that the invention of language reveals a human impulse to reproduce the rhythmic and ordered, so that harmony and unity are delighted in wherever they are found and incorporated, instinctively, into creative activities (Sandy par 2). He breaks the piece down into several different parts, beginning with the defense of poetry as a whole then measured and unmeasured language, the creative faculty in Greece, the poetry of Dante and Milton, and then his concluding argument.

Defense of Poetry In the first section Shelley defends poetry with the use of two classes of mental action, one being reason and the other imagination. He states that reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance (Wu 1185). Shelley argues that every man experiences happiness and delight in certain experiences but Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community (Fordham). He believes a poets role is to be all encompassing in society he states that Poets are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of law, 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 with is called religion. It seems Shelley, in his attempt to defend poetry, takes his idea of what a poet is too far. He encompasses historians and musicians into a single category of poetry which does not sit very well with me. Measured and Unmeasured Language In this section Shelley shows the relationship between sound and poetry. He states Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thought (Fordham). He also shows the distinction of poets and prose writers. He considered Plato and Cicero as poets, which again strikes a bad cord, to use a sound analogy, with me. He also references Plutarch, and Titus Livy, two Roman historians, as being poets. For Shelley to consider these men as simply poets is denying the immense impact these men had on political and historical analysis. Again he takes his ideas too far and should stick to defending poetry and not making obscure references to men far greater in knowledge than he. After faltering on his defense of poetry Shelley makes a very intriguing statement saying that poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food (Fordham). He connects poetry to a more divine presence in the mind than we can imagine. That poetry invokes in us a sense of happiness that is innate and unique in us all. The Creative faculty in Greece In this section Shelley examines the many symbols that represented the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty of Greece. He states of Homer and Sophocles that Their superiority over the succedding writers consists in the presence of those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the absence of those which are connected with the external; their incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all (Fordham). It seems that he believes that these men were products of their society. If they were not products of their culture they would not have had the creative faculty which they possessed. Writers and poets that would precede the Greeks would attempt to copy and duplicate their writing style. The Romans considered the Greeks as the standard to be measured and although they would attempt to stray away from Greek influence it would forever remain in Roman art and architecture. Shelley states The true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the order in which they consist (Fordham) . Now this statement could be debated but it signifies Shelleys deep conviction in the necessity of poetry. The Poetry of Dante and Milton

Shelley begins this section stating The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art (Fordham). Shelley is again drawing the distinction between poetry and the divine. In the works of Dante and Milton there consists a bridge between the past and the present. In this section Shelley diverges from making his defense of poetry to an analysis of poetry on society. He details the effects of Dante and Milton on Europe stating They were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship of modern Europe (Fordham). Shelley places poets on a pedestal higher than any other being. Poetry to him is something divine that records the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds (Fordham). A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men (Fordham). Again he believes poets to be the best and the brightest in society above all others morally, intellectually, and of a higher divine nature. Closing Arguments He concludes his article by acknowledging poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In his defense he considered poetry to be everywhere. That music, documenting of history, painting, and architecture are all apart of poetry. Where he does go a little too far in arguing the totality of poetry he does make a very convincing argument for poetries essential influence in society. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why (Fordham).

For information on my sources for this posting and to inquire about more information, here are a few sites that offer an analysis of The Defense of Poetry and of Percy Shelly himself. Happy reading!

A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. . . Poetry makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. 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; It marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; It subdues to union under its' light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its' presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its' secret alchemy turns to potable gold

the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its' forms. All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. "The mind is its' own place, and of itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its' own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know.