from Shelley's Defence of Poetry (1821). Excerpted. (The ellipses [...] mark excised material).
…
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 Æolian 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.
...
...
In the youth of the world, men
dance and sing and imitate natural objects observing in these actions, as in
all others, a certain rhythm or order….
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. Hence all original religions are
allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of
false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in
which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world,
legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters.
For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those
laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the
future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the
fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense
of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the
spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry
an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet
participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to
his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which
express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction
of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring
it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s
“Paradise” would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact,
if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of
sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more decisive.
Language, color, form, and
religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of
poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the
effect as a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense
expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language,
which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within
the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of
language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of
our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate
combinations, than color, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to
the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is
arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone;
but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art have relations
among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression.
The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which
enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame
of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the
great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have
employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that
of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two performers of equal skill
will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators
and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to
exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a
question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross
opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged
to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.
We have thus circumscribed the word
poetry within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most
perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the
circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and
unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is
inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
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 thoughts. Hence the language of
poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound,
without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to
the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without
reference to that peculiar order.
…
A poem is the very image of life
expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a
poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other
connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the
creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing
in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The
one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain
combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and
contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions
have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the
beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped 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. Hence epitomes
have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A
story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which
should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is
distorted.
…
Having determined what is poetry,
and who are poets, let us proceed to estimate its effects upon 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.
… The whole objection, however, of
the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which
poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges
the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes
examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines
that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one
another. 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 nature, and an identification
of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not
our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure
of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the
imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.
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. Poetry
strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the
same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to
embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his
place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither.
…
We have more moral, political, and
historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more
scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just
distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of
thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals,
government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than
what men now practise and endure. But we let I dare not wait upon I
would, like the poor cat in the adage. We want the creative faculty to
imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we
imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception;
we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which
have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for
want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the
internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to
the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is
to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labor,
to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it
arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to
the curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is
the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
…
The functions of the poetical
faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power,
and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and
arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the
beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired
than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle,
the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the
power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has
then become too unwidely for that which animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine.
It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which
comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is
at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is
that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world
the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the
perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and
the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the
form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.
What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship—what were the scenery of this beautiful
universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the
grave—and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to
bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of
calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be
exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will
compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation
is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,
awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color
of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious
portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its
departure.
…
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. As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of
any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is
the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally
incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue,
of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of
their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard
those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be
found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a
moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in
our own persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and
executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, or form, that certain
motives of those who are “there sitting where we dare not soar,” are
reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Vergil was a
flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon
was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet
laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living
poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to.
Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if
their sins “were as scarlet, they are now white as snow”; they have been washed
in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous
chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the
contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how little is as it
appears—or appears as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye
be judged.
Poetry, as has been said, differs
in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the active
powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary
connection with the consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that
these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects
are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent
recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the
mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its
effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be
frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the
sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live. But as he
is more delicately organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure,
both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the
one and pursue the other with an ardor proportioned to this difference. And he
renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to observe the
circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and flight have
disguised themselves in one another’s garments.
But there is nothing necessarily
evil in this error, and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions
purely evil have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the
lives of poets.
…
The first part of these remarks has
related to poetry in its elements and principles; and it has been shown, as
well as the narrow limits assigned them would permit, that what is called
poetry, in a restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of
order and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are
susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in an universal sense.
The second part will have for its
object an application of these principles to the present state of the
cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern
forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative
and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic development
of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the
national will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. In spite of the
low-thoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a
memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among such philosophers
and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last
national struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald,
companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial
change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an
accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and
impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The person in whom this
power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have
little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the
ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to
serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is
impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the
present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within
their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human
nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their
spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an
unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity
casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the
trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence
which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world.
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