A Defense of Poetry--Percy Bysshe Shelley

English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay.

The Harvard Classics.

1909–14.

A Defence of Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A

CCORDING

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 color them with its own light, and composing from

them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its

own integrity. The one is the [Greek], 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

[Greek], 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. Reason is the enumeration of

qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities,

both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the

similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body

to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.

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. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which

strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can

accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. 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 of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation to the

objects which delight a child these expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. 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. 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

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language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become at once the representation and the

medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statute, the chord and the harmony.

The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results,

begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; the future

is contained within the present, as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity,

contrast, mutual dependence, 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. 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. But let us dismiss those more general considerations

which might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view

to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms.

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. 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. 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

purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been

called taste by modern writers. 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 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. 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. Their language is vitally

metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and

perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through

time, signs for portions or 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.

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‖ 1—and he considers the faculty

which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. 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. 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.

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