shelleydefence

DEFENCE OF POETRY. PART FIRST.

by Percy Bysshe Shelley (excerpta) [1]

On Art & Imitation of Nature:

§13 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 [2].

On Beauty, Harmony and Order:

§20 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. §21 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.

§24 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.

§164 The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea: the consequence was empire, and the reward everliving fame. §165 These things are not the less poetry quia carent vate sacro (i.e., "because they lack a sacred poet"). They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men. §166 The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their harmony.

On Creativity:

§302 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. §303 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 [3]. §304 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] §305 But Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. §306 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. §307 It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. §308 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. §309 It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. §00 It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by re-iteration. §310 It justifies that bold and true word of Tasso: "Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta" [4].

On Harmony, Rhythm, Music and Metre:

§7 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. §8 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. §9 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. §10 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.

§17 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. §18 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. §19 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.

§47 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. §48 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. §49 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.

§224 Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language in itself music and persuasion out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms.

§251 Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. §252 Our sympathy in tragic fiction, depends on this principle: tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. §253 This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseperable (sic, inseparable) from the sweetest melody.

On Imagination (Poetic):

§6 Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the Imagination:" and Poetry is connate with the origin of man.

§37 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. §38 The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication. §39 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.

On Infinity/Divinity (see also Prophecy):

226 His [Dante's] 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. §227 All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn which contained all oaks potentially. §228 Veil after veil may be undrawn and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. §229 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.

§278 Poetry is indeed something divine. §279 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. §280 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. §281 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. §282 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?

§295 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. §296 These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination. §297 And the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. §298 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. §299 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. §300 Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations [5] 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. §301 Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.

On Knowledge and Wisdom:

§275 The functions of the poetical faculty are

two fold (sic, twofold): 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.

§276 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. §277 The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.

On Language:

§25 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.

§34 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 (sic, synonym) of the cause. §35 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. §36 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. §37 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. §38 The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication. §39 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.

On Media [6]:

§291 Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. §292 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.

On Metaphor and Imagery:

§22 Their [7] 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. §23 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.

On Mystery:

§224 Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language in itself music and persuasion out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. §225 He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the restoration of learning; the Lucifer [8] 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. §226 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. §227 All high poetry is infinite [9]; it is as the first acorn which contained all oaks potentially. §228 Veil after veil may be undrawn and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. §229 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.

On Pain, Pleasure & Sorrow:

§249 It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. §250 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. §251 Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. §252 Our sympathy in tragic fiction, depends on this principle: tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. §253 This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseperable (sic, inseparable) from the sweetest melody. §254 The pleasure that is in sorrow, is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. §255 And hence the saying, "It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of mirth." [OT: Ecclesiastes 7.2] §256 Not that this highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. §257 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 [10].

§293 Poetry is the record of the happiest and best moments of the happiest and best minds. §294 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.

On Popularity & Popular Opinion:

§314 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. §315 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.

§319 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. §320 It is presumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation when mental effects are experienced insusceptible of being referred to them. §321 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. §322 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. §323 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. §324 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 [11].

On Posterity:

§316 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. §317 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. §318 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; [11, bis] 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]

On Prophecy:

§28 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... §29 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 the flower and the fruit of latest time. §30 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. §31 A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions of time and place and number are not.

On Reasoning:

§283 Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. §284 A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." §285 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 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. §286 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. §287 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 thier [sic, their] suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by a limitedness of the poetical faculty itself. §288 For Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions. §289 We have his own authority also for the Muse having "dictated" to him "the unpremeditated song." [Milton, Paradise Lost] §290 And let this be an answer to those who would alledge the fifty six various readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso [12].

§319 Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic that it is not subject to the controul (sic, control) of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence has no necessary connexion with consciousness or will. §320 It is presumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation when mental effects are experienced insusceptible of being referred to them. §321 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.

On Society and Poets:

§13 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.

§121 But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay. §122 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.

On Virtue:

§282 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?

§311 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. §312 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. §313 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.

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REFERENCES & NOTES:

[1] I have alphabetically categorized by subject these excerpta from the full text of Percy Bysshe Shelley's, "The Defence of Poetry: Part the First" (1821). Naturally, any such indexing is arbitrary according to the indexer's point of view. So take mine with a grain of salt. I have also repeated some passages, since they readily fall under more than one theme. P.S. There was NO Part the Second, Third etc. He died so young he never got around to these. It is of course intriguing to speculate what he might have written. The members of The New Pleiades might collectively or individually attempt to take a shot at complementing the Defence of Poetry (1821) with "The New Defence of Poetry" (2004 or 2005?)..... who can tell? It surely would be a challenge to our skills.

[2] I have italicized passages to which I wish to draw the reader's critical attention. Most of these passages relate either directly or indirectly to fundamental principles of literary stylistics and of literary criticism.

[3] Here Shelley is clearly inspired by Plato's Allegory of the Cave in his Republic.

[4] Tasso, Italian = "No one merits the name of Creator save God and the Poet.

[5] Shelley has clearly coined this incredible word, "interlunations" for his own purposes. It appears to mean the flashing appearanc of that great light Plato would have defined as infinite wisdom, which pierces intermittently through the veils of moonlit shadows darkening our every step in life. Cf. Psalm 23, "Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me...", where "Thou" here refers to that flash of Illumination we poets refer variously to as "creativity", "imagination" and the like. That this approximates Shelley's meaning I am sure, for in the very next breath he clearly states that the outpourings of the poetic imagination must "abide because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. "

[6] It is altogether striking that Shelley approaches the "modern" meaning word (in the sense that we have come to understand it since the mid-Twentieth Century), even though he writes in 1821. Does this not illustrate his own capacity for poetic prophecy, as he himself defines it?

[7] i.e. the poets' (language)

[8] No, not Satan or the Devil. Shelley refers here to the original Latin meaning of the word, "The Bearer of Light".

[9] Shelley has used Dante merely as an examplar of "high poetry". Other candidates could equally be Francesco Petrarch, William Shakespeare and his own contemporary, John Keats.

[10] i.e. unalloyed by the baser passions, pure, self-sufficent, "virtuous" (See Shelley's definition of "virtue")

[11] So much for criticism from the hoi polloi (the unwashed masses)

[12] Orlando Furioso, a stunning epic poem by the Renaissance Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1503).