A Defence of Poetry

In “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley forces readers to examine their definition of poetry. He claims that poetry is “the expression of the imagination” (5). With this definition, Shelley prompts readers to view poetry as a wellspring that produces everything else, making its importance to society easily recognizable. By encompassing all imaginative works, poetry becomes vital to life.

After broadening the idea of poetry, Shelley goes deeper and distinguishes between his definition of poetry as all works of imagination and the traditional view of poetry: “[P]oetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language” (10-11). The poetry of Shelley and his contemporaries falls within that narrow definition with arrangements of language and meter. According to Shelley, the classic form of poetry is greater than all other works of imagination because poetry is true imagination. Poetry is the act of taking words, which are not physical, tangible objects, and creating something new. Thus, creating something out of nothing is a higher form of art.

Shelley goes on to say that poetry is not a creation of will; it is a faculty of imagination. For him, to write poetry is to follow the muse and the imagination. Poetry is not something that can be willed into creation; it “is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry’” (48). With this statement, Shelley points out that poetry is not an act of reason; it is an unexplainable, divine act of imagination, which makes imagination greater than reason. Making the creation of poetry unexplainable also places more importance on the profession because it is a calling and not something anybody can do. Thus, the call of a poet is divine.

Shelley also claims that poets are philosophers and vice versa. By classifying well-known philosophers such as Plato and Bacon as poets, Shelley puts poetry on a lofty pedestal. The implication is that poetry affects the world’s ideas. Revolutionaries and philosophers are poets because they reveal truth that has always been there:

All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music (14).

Shelley critiques Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who celebrate reason. He states that if they had never lived, the world would’ve been different, but it would be easy “to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited” (42-43). Shelley takes a stand against the age of reason, explaining that although it affected human thought, humans would have ultimately arrived in the same place. But without the great poets, the moral condition of the world would be much in decline—it would be beyond the imagination: “[I]t exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, [...] Chaucer, [nor] Shakespeare [...] had ever existed” (43). Shelley says he cannot imagine how the world would look without those poets whose work affects the moral condition of humanity. Thus, Shelley concludes his argument that the world needs poets; without them, the world would dissolve into corruption.