A Defence of Poetry (1821)
by Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822)
¡¡
¶1
¡ì1 According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action
which are called Reason and Imagination, the former may be considered as mind
contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced;
and the latter as mind, acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with
its own light, and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each
containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. ¡ì2 The one is
the to poiein, or the principle of synthesis and has for its objects
those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the
other is the to-logizein or principle of analysis and its action
regards the relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts,
not in their integral unity but as the algebraical representations which
conduct to certain general results. ¡ì3 Reason is the enumeration of
quantities already known; Imagination [[is]] the perception of the value of
those quantities, both seperately and as a whole. ¡ì4 Reason respects the
differences, and Imagination the similitudes of things. ¡ì5 Reason is to
Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the
shadow to the substance.
¶2
¡ì6 Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of
the Imagination:" and Poetry is connate with the origin of man. ¡ì7 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. ¡ì8 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. ¡ì9 It is as if the lyre could accomodate
its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined
proportion of sound; even as the musician can accomodate his voice to the
sound of the lyre. ¡ì10 A child at play by itself will express its delight by
its voice and motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear
exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions
which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as
the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks
by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration {{Sig. 1v}} of the effect,
to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. ¡ì11 In relation to the objects
which delight a child, these expressions are, what Poetry is to higher
objects. ¡ì12 The savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to
years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a
similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial
imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects and of his
apprehension of them. ¡ì13 Man in society, with all his passions and his
pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an
additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expressions,
and language, gesture and the imitative arts become at once the representation
and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the
chord and the harmony. ¡ì14 The social sympathies, or those laws from which as
from its elements society results, begin to develope themselves from the
moment that two human beings co-exist; the future is contained within the
present as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity,
contrast, mutual dependance become the principles alone capable of affording
the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to
action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue
in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse
of kind. ¡ì15 Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain
order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the
impressions represented by them[[,]]. all expression being subject to the laws
of that from which it proceeds. ¡ì16 But let us dismiss those more general
considerations which might involve an enquiry into the principles of society
itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is
expressed upon its forms.
¶3
¡ì17 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. ¡ì18
And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order in
the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of
language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects. ¡ì19 For there
is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic
representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser
and a purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to
this order has been called taste, by modern writers. ¡ì20 Every man, in the
infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to
that from which this highest delight results: but the diversity is not
sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in
those instances where the {{Sig. 2r}} predominance of this faculty of
approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the
relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. ¡ì21
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. ¡ì22 Their
language is vitally metaphorical; that is it marks the before unapprehended
relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which
re present them become through time signs for portions and 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. ¡ì23 These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon
to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects
of the world * --" and he considers the faculty which
receives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. ¡ì24 In the
infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself
is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a
word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between
existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. ¡ì25
Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic
poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the
works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the
creations of Poetry.
* De Augment. Scient. Cap. I Lib 3.
¶4
¡ì26 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
|&| 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. ¡ì27 Hence all original religions are allegorical or
susceptible of allegory, and like Janus have a double face of false and true.
¡ì28 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. ¡ì29
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 forms of {{Sig. 2v}} the
flower and the fruit of latest time. ¡ì30 Not that I assert poets to be
prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can fortell 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. ¡ì31 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. ¡ì32 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 Æschylus, 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 paper did not forbid citation. ¡ì33 The creations of sculpture, painting
and music are illustrations still more decisive.
¶5
¡ì34 Language, colour, 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 effects as a synonime of the cause. ¡ì35
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. ¡ì36 And
this springs from the nature itself of language which is a more direct
representation of the actions and the passions of our internal being, and is
susceptible of more various and delicate combinations than colour, form or
motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the controul of that faculty of
which it is the creation. ¡ì37 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. ¡ì38 The former is as a
mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of
which both are mediums of communication. ¡ì39 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. ¡ì40 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 {{Sig. 3r}} any excess will remain.
¶6
¡ì41 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. ¡ì42 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.
¶7
¡ì43 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. ¡ì44 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 indispensible to the communication of its
influence, than the words themselves without reference to that peculiar order.
¡ì45 Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a
crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour,
as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.
¡ì46 The plant must spring again from its seed or it will bear no flower --
and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
¶8
¡ì47 An observation of the regular mode of the occurrence of this harmony, in
the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced
metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. ¡ì48
Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accomodate his language to
this traditional form, so that the harmony which is its spirit, be observed.
¡ì49 The practise is indeed convenient and popular and to be preferred,
especially in such composition as includes much action: but every great poet
must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact
structure of his peculiar versification. ¡ì50 The distinction between poets
and prose-writers is a vulgar error. ¡ì51 The distinction between philosophers
and poets has been anticipated. ¡ì52 Plato was essentially a poet -- the truth
and splendour of his imagery and the melody of his language is the most
intense that it is possible to conceive. ¡ì53 He {{Sig. 3v}} rejected the
measure of the epic, dramatic and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a
harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forebore to invent
any regular plan of rhythm which would include under determinate forms, the
varied pauses of his style. ¡ì54 Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his
periods but with little success. ¡ì55 Lord Bacon was a poet. *
His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm which satisfies the sense no less
than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect;
it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the
readers' mind and pours itself forth together with it into the universal
element with which it has perpetual sympathy. ¡ì56 -- 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. ¡ì57 Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed
traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their
subjects, less incapable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than
those who have omitted that form. ¡ì58 Shakespear, Dante and Milton (to
confine ourselves to modern writers.) are philosophers of the very loftiest
powers.
* See the Filium Labyrinthi, and the Essay of Death particularly.
¶9
¡ì59 A Poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. ¡ì60
There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion 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. ¡ì61 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 {{Sig. 4r}} human nature. ¡ì62 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
developes new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it
contains. ¡ì63 Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they
eat out the poetry of it. ¡ì64 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.
¶10
¡ì65 The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a
whole being a poem. ¡ì66 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. ¡ì67 And thus all the
great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, were poets; and although the plan
of these writers, especially that of Livy, constrained them from developing
this faculty in its highest degree they make copious and ample amends for
their subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with living
images.
¶11
¡ì68 Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to
estimate its effects upon society.
¶12
¡ì69 Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls,
open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. ¡ì70
In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are
fully aware of the excellency of poetry: for it acts in a divine and
unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness: and it is reserved for
future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in
all the strength and splendour of their union. ¡ì71 Even in modern times, no
living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in
judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of
his peers: it must be [[impanelled]] in pannelled by Time from the selectest
of the wise of many generations. ¡ì72 A Poet is a nightingale who sits in
darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors
{{Sig. 4v}} 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. ¡ì73 The poems
of Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were
the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all
succeeding civilization has reposed. ¡ì74 Homer embodied the ideal perfection
of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses
were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector and Ulysses:
the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism and persevering devotion to an
object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations: the
sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy
[[with]] which such great and lovely impersonations until from admiring they
imitated, and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of
their admiration. ¡ì75 Nor let it be objected, that these characters are
remote from moral perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as
edyfying paterns for general imitation. ¡ì76 Every epoch under names more or
less specious has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked Idol of
the worship of a semi barbarous age; and self-deceit is the veiled Image of
unknown evil before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. ¡ì77 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. ¡ì78 An epic or dramatic personage is understood
to wear them around his soul, as he may the antient armour or the modern
uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful
than either. ¡ì79 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. ¡ì80 A majestic form, and graceful motions will express
themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. ¡ì81 Few poets of
the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in
its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of
costume, habit etc. be not necessary to temper this planetary music for mortal
ears. {{Sig. 5r}}
¶13
¡ì82 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. ¡ì83 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. ¡ì84 But poetry acts in
another and a diviner manner. ¡ì00 It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by
rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of
thought. ¡ì85 Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world; and
makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it re-produces 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 co-exists. ¡ì86 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, action or person, not our own. ¡ì87
A man to be greatly good, must imagine in tensely and comprehensively; he must
put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and
pleasures of his species must become his own. ¡ì88 The great instrument of
moral good is the imagination: and poetry administers to the effect by acting
upon the cause. ¡ì89 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. ¡ì90
Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man
in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. ¡ì91 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 {{Sig. 5v}} creations, which
participate in neither. ¡ì92 By this assumption of the inferior office of
interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself
but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in the cause. ¡ì93
There was little danger that Homer or any of the eternal poets, should have so
far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest
dominion. ¡ì94 Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less
intense as Euripedes, Lucan, Tasso, Spencer have frequently affected a moral
aim and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the
degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.
¶14
¡ì95 Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the
dramatic and lyrical Poets of Athens; who flourished [[contemporaneously]]
contemporaneosly with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of
the poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture,
philosophy, and we may add the forms of civil life. ¡ì96 For although the
scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which the poetry
existing in Chivalry and Christianity have erased from the habits and
institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any other period has so much
energy, beauty and virtue been developed; never was blind strength and
stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or that
will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during
the century which preceeded the death of Socrates. ¡ì97 Of no other epoch in
the history of our species have we records and fragments stamped so visibly
with the image of the divinity in man. ¡ì98 But it is Poetry alone, in form,
in action or in language which has rendered this epoch memorable above all
others, and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. ¡ì99 For written
poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an
idle enquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which all as
from a common focus have scattered over the darkest periods of succeeding
time. ¡ì100 We know no more of cause and effect than a constant conjunction of
events: Poetry is ever found to coexist with whatsoever other arts contribute
to the happiness and perfection of man. ¡ì101 I appeal to what has already
been established to distinguish between the cause and the effect.
¶15
¡ì102 {{Sig. 6r}} It was at the period here adverted to, that the Drama had
its birth; and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed
those few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to
us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was under stood or practised
according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. ¡ì103 For the Athenians
employed language, action, music, painting, the dance, and religious
institutions, to produce a common effect in the representation of the highest
idealisms of passion and of power; each division in the art was made perfect
in its kind by artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into
a beautiful pro portion and unity one towards the other. ¡ì104 On the modern
stage a few only of the elements capable of expressing the image of the poets
conception are employed at once. ¡ì105 We have tragedy without music and
dancing; and music and dancing without the highest impersonation of which they
are the fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. ¡ì106
Religious institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. ¡ì107
Our system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many
expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be moulded into one
permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial and
inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing -- but a monologue where all the
attention may be directed to some great master of ideal mimicry. ¡ì108 The
modern practise of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great abuse
in point of practise, is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but
the comedy should be as in King Lear, universal, ideal and sublime. ¡ì109 It
is perhaps the intervention of this principle which determines the balance in
favour of King Lear against the Œdipus Tyrannus or the Agamemnon, or, if
you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the intense
power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter, should be
considered as restoring the equilibrium. ¡ì110 King Lear, if it can sustain
the comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic
art existing in the world; in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet
was subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the Drama which has
prevailed in Modern Europe. ¡ì111 Calderon in his religious Autos has
attempted to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic representation
neglected by Shakespear; such as the establishing a {{Sig. 6v}} relation
between the drama and religion, and the accomodating them to music and
dancing, but he omits the observation of conditions still more important, and
more is lost than gained by a substitution of the rigidly defined and ever
repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living impersonations
of the truth of human passion.
¶16
¡ì112 But we digress. ¡ì113 -- The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally
recognized: in other words the presence or absence of poetry in its most
perfect and universal form has been found to be connected with good and evil
in conduct or habit. ¡ì114 The corruption which has been imputed to the drama
as an effect begins, when the poetry employ in its constitution, ends: I
appeal to the history of manners whether the [[periods]] of the growth of the
one and the decline of the other have not corresponded with an exactness equal
to any other example of moral cause and effect.
¶17
¡ì115 The drama at Athens or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual greatness of the
age. ¡ì116 The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the
spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of
all, but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the
internal type of all that he loves, admires and would become. ¡ì117 The
imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty that
they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are
[[conceived]] concieved; the good affections are strengthened by pity,
indignation, terror and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the
satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life; even
crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being
represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies of {{Sig.
7r}} nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men can no longer
cherish it as the creation of their choice. ¡ì118 In a drama of the highest
order there is little food for censure or hatred: it teaches rather self
knowledge and self-respect. ¡ì119 Neither the eye or the mind can see itself
unless reflected upon that which it resembles. ¡ì120 The drama so long as it
continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many sided mirror, which
collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them
from the simplicity of these elementary forms; and touches them with majesty
and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power
of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
¶18
¡ì121 But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with
that decay. ¡ì122 Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
master-pieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the
kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood: or a weak attempt to
teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and which
are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness
with which the author in common with his auditors are infected. ¡ì123 Hence
what has been called the classical and the domestic drama. ¡ì00 Addison's Cato
is a specimen of the one, and would it were not superfluous to cite examples
of the other! ¡ì124 To such purposes Poetry cannot be made subservient. ¡ì00
Poetry is a sword of lightning ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard
that would contain it. ¡ì125 And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of
this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and
passion: which divested of imagination are other names for caprice and
appetite. ¡ì126 The period in our own history of the greatest degradation of
the drama is the reign of Charles II when all forms in which poetry had been
accustomed to be expressed become hymns to the triumph of kingly power over
liberty and virtue. ¡ì127 Milton stood alone illuminating an age unworthy of
him. ¡ì00 At such periods the calculating principle pervades all the forms of
dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed upon them. ¡ì128 Comedy
loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self
complacency and triumph instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm |&|
contempt succeeds to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. ¡ì129
Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes,
from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: {{Sig.
7v}} it is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth
new food; which it devours in secret.
¶19
¡ì130 The Drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other; the
connexion of beauty and social good, is more observable in the drama than in
what ever other form: and it is indisputable that the highest perfection of
human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence: and
that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has
once flourished is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the
energies which sustain the soul of social life. ¡ì131 But, as Machiavelli says
of political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men
should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. ¡ì132 And
this is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all language,
institution and form require not only to be produced but to be sustained: the
office and character of a poet participates in the divine nature as regards
providence no less than as regards creation.
¶20
¡ì133 Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the
Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms were so many symbols of the extinction
or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. ¡ì134 The bucolic writers who
found patronage under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Œgypt were the
latest representatives of its most glorious reign. ¡ì135 Their poetry is
intensely melodious; like the odour of the tuberose it overcomes and sickens
the spirit with excess of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age
was as a meadow-gale of June which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of
the field and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows
the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. ¡ì136 The bucolic
and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in
statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions
which distinguished the epoch to which we now refer. ¡ì137 Nor is it the
poetical faculty itself or any misapplication of it to which this want of
harmony is to be imputed. ¡ì138 An equal sensibility to the influence of the
senses |&| the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer and
Sophocles. ¡ì139 the {{Sig. 8r}} former especially has clothed sensual and
pathetic images with irresistible attractions. ¡ì140 Their superiority over
these succeeding 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. ¡ì141 lt is not what the erotic poets have, but
what they have not, in which their imperfection consists. ¡ì142 It is not
inasmuch as they were Poets, but inasmuch as they were not Poets, that they
can be considered with any plausibility as connected with the corruption of
their age. ¡ì143 Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the
sensibility to pleasure, passion and natural scenery, which is imputed to them
as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been atchieved. ¡ì144
For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure;
and therefore it is corruption. ¡ì145 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 hardly sense survives. ¡ì146 At the approach of such a period, Poetry
ever addresses itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed,
and its voice is heard, like the foot steps of Astræa, departing from
the world. ¡ì147 Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are
capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of
whatever beautiful, or generous, or true can have place in an evil time. ¡ì148
It will readily [[be]] confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of
Syracuse and Alexandria who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus were
less cold, cruel and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. ¡ì149 But
corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before
Poetry can ever cease. ¡ì150 The sacred links of that chain have never been
entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached
to those great minds whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent
forth which at once connects, animates and sustains the life of all. ¡ì151 It
is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and
of social renovation. ¡ì152 And let us not circumscribe the effects of the
bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to
whom it was addressed. ¡ì153 They may have perceived the beauty {{Sig. 8v}} of
these immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those
who are more finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as
episodes to that great poem, which all poets like the co-operating thoughts of
one great mind have built up since the beginning of the world.
¶21 ¶22 ¶23 ¶24 ¶25 ¶26 ¶27 ¶28 ¶29 ¶30 ¶31 ¶32 ¶33 ¶34 ¶35 ¶36 ¶37 ¶38 ¶39 ¶40 ¶41 ¶42 ¶43 ¶44 ¶45 ¶46 ¶47 ¶48 ¶49 ¶50 Copytext: from the electronic edition published in the CD-ROM in Using
TACT with Electronic Texts (New York: Modern Language Association,
1996). This edition does not note the manuscript page numbers, keep to the
original lineation, or make a point of indicating text that Shelley deleted,
substituted or added, or transcribe manuscript marks such as the caret. This
text represents Shelley's apparently final version, without evidence of how he
arrived at it.
Suggested editorial additions and emendations appear in square brackets at
the start of the affected point. Suggested editorial deletions are in triple
square brackets. Text within double braces is editorial.
Old spelling is retained except for ligatured letters, which are
normalized. Italics is retained, but not small capitals and the text of
catchwords, signatures, and running titles. Reference citations are by
signatures and editorial through-text paragraph- and sentence-numbers at the
left margin.
Greek is transliterated according to the following scheme:
¡¡
Online text
copyright © 2004, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English,
University of Toronto. ¡¡
¡ì154 The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in Antient Rome:
but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have been perfectly
saturated with the poetical element. ¡ì155 The Romans appear to have
considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of
manners and of nature and to have abstained from creating in measured
language, sculpture, music or architecture any thing which might bear a
particular relation to their own condition whilst it should bear a general one
to the universal constitution of the world. ¡ì156 But we judge from partial
evidence, and we judge perhaps partially. ¡ì157 Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius and
Accius, all great poets, have been lost. ¡ì158 Lucretius is in the highest,
and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. ¡ì00 The chosen delicacy of the
expressions of the latter are as a mist of light which conceal from us the
intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. ¡ì159 Livy is
instinct with poetry. ¡ì00 Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other
great writers of the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of
Greece. ¡ì160 The institutions also and the religion of Rome were less
poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance.
¡ì161 Hence Poetry in Rome seemed to follow rather than accompany the
perfection of political and domestic society. ¡ì162 The true Poetry of Rome
lived in its [[institutions]] instituons; for whatever of beautiful, true and
majestic they contained could have sprung only from the faculty which creates
the order in which they consist. ¡ì163 The life of Camillus; the death of
Regulus; the expectation of the senators in their godlike state of the
victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with Hannibal
after the battle of Cannæ, were not the consequences of a refined
calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm
and order in the shews of life, to those who were at once the poets and the
actors of these im
¡ì167 At length the antient system of religion and manners had [[fulfilled]]
fufilled the circle of its revolutions. ¡ì168 And the world would have fallen
into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the
authors of the Christian and Chivalric systems of manners and religion, who
created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which copied into
the imaginations of men became as generals to the bewildered armies of their
thoughts. ¡ì169 It is foreign to the present purpose to touch upon the evil
produced by these systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the
principles already established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the
poetry they contain.
¡ì170 It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon and Isaiah
had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his disciples. ¡ì171
The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers of this
extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid poetry. ¡ì172 But
his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. ¡ì173 At a certain period
after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded upon those promulgated by
him, the three forms into which Plato had distributed the faculties of mind
underwent a sort of apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the
civilised world. ¡ì174 Here it is to be confessed that -- "Light seems to
thicken,[["]] {{Shakespeare, Macbeth III.ii.50-53.}}
Good things of day begin to droop and drowze
And nights black agents to their preys do rouze.
{{Shakespeare, Macbeth III.ii.50-53}}
¡ì175 But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of
this fierce chaos! ¡ì176 how the World, as from a resurrection, balancing
itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its yet
unwearied flight into the Heaven of time! ¡ì177 Listen to {{Sig. 9v}} the
music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind
nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
¡ì178 The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman Empire, out lived the
darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and
blended themselves into a new fabric of manners and opinions. ¡ì179 It is an
error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or
to the predominance of the Celtic nations. ¡ì180 Whatever of evil their
agencies may have contained sprung from the extinction of the poetical
principle, connected with the progress of despotism and superstition. ¡ì181
Men, from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and
selfish: their own will had become feeble and yet they were its slaves, and
thence the slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty and
fraud characterised a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of
¡ì184 It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of
the Christian and the Chivalric systems began to manifest them selves. ¡ì185
The principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his
republic, as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the materials of
pleasure and of power produced by the common skill and labour of human beings
ought to be distributed among them. ¡ì186 The limitations of this rule were
asserted by him to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the
utility to result to all. ¡ì187 Plato, following the doctrines of Timæus
and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine
comprehending at once the past, the present and the future condition of man.
¡ì188 Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these
views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became {{Sig.
10r}} the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and
wisdom of antiquity. ¡ì189 The incorporation of the Celtic nations with the
exhausted population of the South, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry
existing in their mythology and institutions. ¡ì190 The result was a sum of
the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be
assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without
incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. ¡ì191 The
abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from
a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity were among the
consequences of these events.
¡ì192 The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political
hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. ¡ì193 The freedom of
women produced the poetry of sexual love. ¡ì194 Love became a religion, the
idols of whose worship were ever present. ¡ì00 It was as if the statues of
Apollo, and the muses had been endowed with life and motion and had walked
forth among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants
of a diviner world. ¡ì195 The familiar appearance and proceedings of life
became wonderful and heavenly; and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks
of Eden. ¡ì196 And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creations were
poets; and language was the instrument of their art: "Galeotto fu il
libro, e chi lo scrisse". {{Dante, Inferno V.137}} The Provençal
Trouveurs, or inventors preceeded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells which
unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of
Love. ¡ì197 It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that
beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the gentleness
and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred emotions can render men
more amiable, more generous, and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours
of the little world of self. ¡ì198 Dante understood the secret things of love
even more than Petrarch. ¡ì00 His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of
purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period,
and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. ¡ì199 His
apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the gradations of his own love and her
loveliness by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the
throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most {{Sig. 10v}} glorious imagination of
modern poetry. ¡ì200 The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgement of
the vulgar and the order of the great acts of the "Divine Drama" in
the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell, Purgatory and
Paradise. ¡ì201 The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. ¡ì202 Love
which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the antients has been
celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the
music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the
dissonance of arms, and superstition. ¡ì203 At successive intervals Ariosto,
Tasso, Shakespear, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau and the great writers of our
own age have celebrated the dominion of love; planting as it were trophies in
the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force. ¡ì204 The
true relation borne to each other by the senses into which human kind is
distributed has become less misunderstood; and if the error which confounded
diversity with in equality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially
recognized in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we owe this
great benefit to the worship of which Chivalry was the law, and poets the
prophets.
¡ì205 The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the
stream of time which unites the modern and the antient world. ¡ì206 The
distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have
idealised, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk
through eternity enveloped and disguised. ¡ì207 It is a difficult question to
determine how far they were conscious of the distinction which must have
subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people. ¡ì208
Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Riphæus
whom Virgil calls
¡ì218 Homer was the first, and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second
poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to
the knowledge, and sentiment, and religion, and political condition of the age
in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it: developing itself in
correspondence with their developement. ¡ì219 For Lucretius had limed the
wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world: and Virgil with
a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator
even whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of
mock birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber,
Smyrnæus, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius or Claudian have sought even to fulfil
a single condition of epic truth. ¡ì220 Milton was the third Epic Poet: for if
the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the Æneid still
less can it be conceded to the Orlando Furioso, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the
Lusiad or the Fairy Queen.
¡ì221 Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the antient 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. ¡ì222 The one preceeded and the other followed, the Reformation at
almost equal intervals. ¡ì223 Dante was the first religious reformer, and
Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony, than in the boldness
of his censures of papal usurpation. ¡ì224 Dante was the first awakener of
entranced Europe; he created a language in itself music and persuasion out of
a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. ¡ì225 He was the congregator of those
great spirits who presided over the restoration of learning; the Lucifer of
that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican
Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. ¡ì226 His
very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of
inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their
birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. ¡ì227
All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn which contained all oaks
potentially. ¡ì228 Veil after veil may be undrawn and the inmost naked beauty
of the meaning never exposed. ¡ì229 A great Poem is a fountain for ever
overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and
one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations
enable them to share; another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are
ever developed, the source of an unforseen and an unconceived delight.
¡ì230 The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch and {{Sig.
12r}} Boccaccio was characterised by a revival of painting, sculpture, music
and architecture. ¡ì231 Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the
superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials of Italian
invention.
¡ì232 But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of
poetry and its influence on society. ¡ì233 Be it enough to have pointed out
the effects of poets in the large and true sense of the word upon their own
and all succeeding times.
¡ì234 But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
and mechanists on another plea. ¡ì235 It is admitted that the exercise of the
imagination is most delightful, but it is alledged that that of reason is more
useful. ¡ì236 Let us examine as the ground of this distinction what is here
meant by Utility. ¡ì237 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. ¡ì238 There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable,
universal and permanent; the other transitory and particular. ¡ì239 Utility
may either express the means of producing the former, or the latter. ¡ì00 In
the former sense whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges
the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. ¡ì240 But the meaning in
which the author of the Four Ages of Poetry seems to have employed the word
utility is the narrower one of banishing the importunity of the wants of our
animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the
grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of
mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal
advantage.
¡ì241 Undoubtedly the promoters of utility in this limited sense, have their
appointed office in society. ¡ì242 They follow the [[footsteps]] foosteps of
poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life.
¡ì243 They make space and give time. ¡ì00 Their exertions are of the highest
value so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of the
inferior {{Sig. 12v}} powers of our own nature within the limits [[[of is]]]
due to the superior ones. ¡ì244 But whilst the sceptic destroys gross
superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have
defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. ¡ì245
Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the political œconomist combines,
labour, let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondance
with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as
they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
want. ¡ì246 They have exemplified the saying; "To him that hath, more
shall be given; and from him that hath not the little that he hath shall be
taken away." {{Mark, NT: Mark 4.25}} ¡ì247 -- The rich have become
richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven
between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. ¡ì248 Such are the
effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating
faculty.
¡ì249 It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition
involving a number of apparent paradoxes. ¡ì250 For, from an inexplicable
defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the
inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions
of our being. ¡ì251 Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the
chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. ¡ì252 Our sympathy
in tragic fiction, depends on this principle: tragedy delights by affording a
shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. ¡ì253 This is the source also of
the melancholy which is inseperable from the sweetest melody. ¡ì254 The
pleasure that is in sorrow, is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
¡ì255 And hence the saying, "It is better to go to the house of mourning,
than to the house of mirth." {{OT: Ecclesiastes 7.2}} ¡ì256 Not that this
highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. ¡ì257 The delight
of love and friendship, the extacy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the
perception, and still more of the creation of poetry is often wholly
unalloyed.
¡ì258 The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
utility. ¡ì259 Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
poetical philosophers.
¡ì260 The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau {{Sig. 13r}} *
and their disciples in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity are entitled
to the gratitude {{Sig. 13v}} of mankind? ¡ì261 Yet it is easy to calculate
the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have
exhibited, had they never lived. ¡ì262 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. ¡ì263 We might not at this moment have been congratulating
each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. ¡ì264 But it exceeds
all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the
world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon,
Lord Bacon, nor Milton had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had
never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival
of the study of Greek Literature had never taken place; if no monuments of
antient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the
religion of the antient world had been extinguished together with its belief.
¡ì265 The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these
excitements, have been awakened to the invention of those grosser sciences,
and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society,
which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive
and creative faculty itself.
¡ì266 We have more moral, political and historical wisdom than we know how to
reduce into practice: we have more scientific and œconomical knowledge
than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it
multiplies. ¡ì267 The poetry, in these systems of thought, is concealed by the
accumulation of facts and calculating processes. ¡ì268 There is no want of
knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government and
political œconomy, or at least what is wiser and better than what men now
practise and endure. ¡ì269 But we "let I dare not wait upon I
would, "like the poor cat in the adage". {{Shakespeare, Macbeth
I.vii.44-45}} ¡ì270 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. ¡ì271 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. ¡ì272
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 labour,
to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? ¡ì273 From what other cause
has it arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a
weight to the curse imposed on Adam? ¡ì274 Poetry, and the principle of Self,
of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the
world.
¡ì275 The functions of the poetical faculty are two fold: 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. ¡ì276 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. ¡ì277 The body has then become too
unwieldy for that which animates it.
¡ì278 Poetry is indeed something divine. ¡ì279 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. ¡ì280 It is at the same time the root
and the 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. ¡ì281 It is the perfect and
consummate surface and bloom of things; it is as the odour and the colour of
the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it; as the form and
splendour of unfaded beauty, to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. ¡ì282
What were Virtue, Love, Patriotism, Friendship -- What were the scenery of
this beautiful universe which we inhabit - - what were our consolations on
this side 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? ¡ì283 Poetry is not
like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the
will. ¡ì284 A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." ¡ì285 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 colour 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. Could this
influence be durable in its original purity and grace, it is impossible to
predict the greatness of the results; but when composition {{Sig. 14r}} begins
inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has
ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the
original conceptions of the poet. ¡ì286 I appeal to the greatest Poets of the
present day, whether it be not an error to assert that the greatest passages
of poetry are produced by labour and study. ¡ì287 The toil and the delay
recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a
careful observation of the inspired moments and an artificial connection of
the spaces between [[their]] thier suggestions by the intertexture of
conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by a limitedness of the
poetical faculty itself. ¡ì288 For Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a
whole before he executed it in portions. ¡ì289 We have his own authority also
for the Muse having "dictated" to him "the unpremeditated
song." {{Milton, Paradise Lost}} ¡ì290 And let this be an answer
to those who would alledge the fifty six various readings of the first line of
the Orlando Furioso. ¡ì291 Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic
is to painting. ¡ì292 This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is
still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts: a great statue or
picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb,
and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of
accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the
process.
¡ì293 Poetry is the record of the happiest and best moments of the happiest
and best minds. ¡ì294 We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own
mind alone, and always arising unforseen and departing unbidden; but elevating
and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the
regret they leave there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in
the nature of its object. ¡ì295 It is as it were the interpenetration of a
diviner nature through our own, but its footsteps are like those of a wind
over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on
the wrinkled sand which paves it. ¡ì296 These and corresponding conditions of
being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility
and the most enlarged imagination. ¡ì297 And the state of mind produced by
them is at war with every base desire. ¡ì298 The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and
whilst they last self appears as what it is, an atom to an Universe.
¡ì299 {{Sig. 14v}} Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits
of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine
with the evanescent hues of this etherial world; a word, a trait in the
representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and
reanimate in those who have ever experienced these emotions the sleeping, the
cold, the buried image of the past. ¡ì300 Poetry thus 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. ¡ì301 Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in
man.
¡ì302 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. ¡ì303 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.
¡ì304 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." {{Milton, Paradise Lost}} ¡ì305 But
Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of
surrounding impressions. ¡ì306 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. ¡ì307 It makes us the inhabitants of
a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. ¡ì308 It reproduces the common
Universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it urges from our
inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our
being. ¡ì309 It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that
which we know. ¡ì00 It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated
in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by re-iteration. ¡ì310
It {{Sig. 15r}} justifies that bold and true word of Tasso:
¡ì311 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. ¡ì312 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. ¡ì313 That he is the wisest, the happiest and
the best, in as much 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. ¡ì314 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"
{{Milton, Paradise Lost IV.829}} are reprehensible. ¡ì315 Let us assume
that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Lord Bacon was a
peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spencer was a poet laureate. ¡ì316
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. ¡ì317
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. ¡ì318 Observe in what a
ludicrous chaos the imputations of real and of 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 {{NT: Matthew 7.1}}
¡ì319 Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic that it is
not subject to the controul of the active powers of the mind, and that its
birth and recurrence has no necessary connexion with consciousness or will. ¡ì320
It is presumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of all
mental causation when mental effects are experienced insus{{Sig. 15v}}
ceptible of being referred to them. ¡ì321 The frequent recurrence of the
poetical power, it is obvious to suppose may produce in the mind an habit of
order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon
other minds. ¡ì322 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. ¡ì323 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 ardour proportioned to this
difference. ¡ì324 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.
¡ì325 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.
¡ì326 I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down
these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to my mind
by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of observing the formality
of a polemical reply; but if the view which they contain be just, they will be
found to [[involve]]in volve a refutation of the arguers against Poetry, -- so
far at least as regards the first division of the subject. ¡ì327 I can readily
conjecture what should have moved the gall of some learned and intelligent
writers who quarrel with certain versifiers. ¡ì328 I confess myself like them
unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. ¡ì329
Bavius and Mævius undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable
persons. ¡ì330 But it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather
than confound.
¡ì331 The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements
and principles; and it has been shewn, 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.
¡ì332 The second part will have for its object an application of these {{Sig.
16r}} principles to the present state of the cultivation of Poetry, and a
defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and opinion,
and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty.
¡ì333 For the literature of England, an energetic developement of which has
ever preceded or accompanied a great and free developement of the national
will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. ¡ì334 In spite of the
lowthoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a
memorable age in intellectual atchievements, 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. ¡ì335 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. ¡ì336
At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and
receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. ¡ì337
The persons 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. ¡ì338 But even whilst they deny and
abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the Power which is seated on the
throne of their own soul. ¡ì339 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. ¡ì340 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. ¡ì341 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. ¡ì342 Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.
Source: a new encoded transcription from the photographic facsimile in The
Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts: A Facsimile Edition, XX, ed. Michael O'Neill
(New York and London: Garland, 1994): 20-83; PR 5401 1986 v20 Robarts Library.
The source of the facsimile is Bodleian Library Ms. Shelley e.6.
Editor: Ian Lancashire, Rep. Criticism On-line (1996).
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