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. Bowdoin College. Accessed 4 Nov. No information provided on date posted. Any quote cited was taken directly from this page and are not my own. Shelley, a great Romantic poet and critic, defends poetry by claiming that the poet creates human values and imagines the forms that shape the social and cultural order Unlike to Peacock, for Shelley, each poetic mind, recreates its own private universe and poets, thus are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
For Shelley, Poetry is the vehicle to reach to the ideal world or platonic world. He argues that all forms of arts and science depend up on nature but poetry improves the nature and creates better than it. Here, his views share similarities with Aristotle, who said that a poet is not only an imitator but also a creator. Reason and imagination are the two faculties of mind. Reason breaks the things in to parts and analyses it. Thus the reason is the principle of analysis.
On the other hand, imagination synthesizes the components. Since imagination is the principle of synthesis that can false contradictory forces. Imagination has soothing power that pacifies the mind and the people become moral. It creates the best mind and the happiest moment so, peaceful mind is required to produce the poetry. Shelley believes that poetry strengthens the moral faculty and gives pleasure so he treats imagination both as creative and pragmatic aspects.
The poet is a moral teacher who gives idea and pleasure to the society by teaching indirectly. Poet is a prophet and legislator who create social norms rules and moral lessons with the help of poetry. A poet to him is not only the author of language of music of the dance, and of architecture but is also the legislator of laws the founder of civil society.
Thus, poetry, unlike to Peacock has its social and moral functions along with its aesthetic pleasure. 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.
The poet is able to tap into universality and see beyond his limited social situation. He speaks to truth and imparts wisdom. A single sentence may be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought.
And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, were poets… they made copious and ample amends for their subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.
Since the beginning of time, those who lack the imaginative faculty, those of pure reason and science, have always challenged the status of the poet. They care only about the present, only about themselves. It is admitted that the exercise of the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds of this distinction what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces.
There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal, and permanent; the other transitory and particular. In the former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining it to express that which banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of superstitions, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage.
Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics.
For Shelley the poet possesses a more developed faculty of imagination than any other man, and his social significance lies in the way his fine understanding of reality gets expressed and perpetuated within a community. It is not surprising that Shelley puts poets right at the top of a hierarchy of sensibility, in a moment when thinkers and philosophers had started to think about the concept of genius as a quality of the individual artist instead of something in the work produced.
What is being affirmed is the dependence of the mode of perception on the percipient; there is no direct access into reality. It all gets translated into our minds and must be organized in language in order to be communicated. Poetry does not participate in specific contexts of time and space, and the poet should not try to embody in his work the conditions of his age or region.
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. Poetry is placed at the very top of the agenda of his metaphysical investigation. Not even time is objective for Shelley. He draws from his proximity to the eternal order of truth and beauty, material to compose his poems, and a poem is an inexhaustible source of new thoughts and relations.
Shelley says that time only serves to increase the possibilities of a poem, in opposition to its effect over — non-poetical — stories, which will lose their meaning or significance as time passes. Therefore a poem can never have a final, definite, interpretation — its meaning lies always ahead, in the future. This process can be explained in the terms of a translation the mind performs, converting external and internal impressions sensorial input, emotions, feelings into thoughts — or concepts — that will function as a mental reproduction of the universe of our experience.
Imagination allows one to produce these thoughts, that are compared and contrasted by reason. Shelley proposes that poets are specially suited for this job because they stand in peculiar proximity to the ideal realm of truth and beauty unchanging and beyond the experiential material world , and the reason for that is that poets have a special attunement to the world that allows them to produce good translations of reality which will stand the test of Time by constant reinterpretation.
As an Aeolian harp produces sounds through its interaction with the wind, man thinks through his interaction with — and translation of — material reality; Shelley identifies an analogy between physical processes such as the sound of the harp and thinking. Dutton and Co, p. An Object-Oriented Defence of Poetry p. What Praise Poems are for p. The Origin of the Work of Art p.
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