Some notes on Shelley's "Defence"

Since I'm at home sick, and we have a lot of poetry to cover in class next Tuesday, I thought I'd share some thoughts on Shelley's great "Defence of Poetry." The essay is provocative and influential (on Yeats, for instance, who pretty much adopts much of its philosophy as his own), and is the strongest statement on the importance, beauty, and power of poetry in the Romantic period, or ever, really.

A key aspect of his argument is that poetry can be expanded to include all creativity and originality that has some relation to language (an argument Emerson takes up later). Thus, Shelley says, the language of poets is "vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things" (858). He continues that the poet "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." There is in Shelley's thinking about poets and poetry a strong link to ideas also found in Hegel (a more or less contemporaneous writer). That is, both believe that truth is progressive, not fixed, and that it is revealed in bits and pieces by great, insightful minds, responding to the ideas and writings of others. Deep thinkers are able somehow to anticipate future progressive ideas, and bring them into the present, even if they don't fully understand them yet. This is what Shelley means in the final great sentences of his essay, that "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" (868). Poets engage the world around them, see what it is and what it might be, and produce language that taps into this zeitgeist. In making truth apparent, poetry helps bring those new ideas into being, even though they are not really the ideas of individual genius, but of the world itself. This is how poets might be thought of as prophets, not in the religious sense, but in a philosophical one. And this is what Shelley hoped to do himself--to represent new kinds of truth to the world, just as he felt the early Wordsworth had done.

Another great passage, one I find fairly moving, is  on page 862, in which he discusses the moral effects of great poetry. Poetry, he says "awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended [that word again] combinations of thought." So, again, poetry shows us truth that other kinds of art or representation can't, not because of the manner of its expression so much as because of the manner of its creation--that it gets at something below the surface, heretofore "unapprehended" but out there nonetheless. But poetry also gets us to "go[] out of own nature," which is the "great secret of morals." "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 pleasures 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." There has always been  debate about whether art can make us better somehow (and it's really not clear how you could ever measure or know this), but Shelley's claims here are ones of belief and faith in the power of literature. I have to say that they are beliefs I share--that they come with the sense of committing one's life to the study of literature and poetry, that it does some good in the world.

He goes on to make the dubious claim that poets must therefore themselves be "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.... The greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue" (867). This can't be true, of course, any more than the idea that meat is the root of all evil (as he says in his tract on the vegetable diet), but it's a nice idea. In any case, he goes on to say that any actual sins of poets are washed clean by the virtue in their work, a kind of utilitarian idea that your ultimate virtue is not about purity, but about the amount of lasting good your work does in the world.