Shelley's 'A Defence of Poetry'

Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound

Artist: Joseph Severn

img src: www.wam.umd.edu/~djb/shelley/gallery/homepic.jpg

‘A Defence of Poetry’ is the only finished prose work Shelley left. Shelley wrote this essay as a response to Thomas Love Peacock’s essay ‘Four Ages of Poetry’. He says, Poetry in the general sense may be defined to be “the expression of imagination:” and poetry is connate with the origin of man.
Shelley’s use of poetry is inclusive referring to literature as a genre perse imaginative writing in general and poetry considered as a human faculty. The defence is aimed against utilitarian definitions of value and happiness accompanying the growth of industrial culture. Poetry is the expression of imagination whose unifying functions are distinguished from Reason’s neutral observation of differences.
Talking of the poets he mentions that in earlier ages the poets were called prophets or legislators; but he is of the view that the poets comprises and unites both these characters. This is because a poet not only observes the present as it is but also is able to see the future in the present. He writes, “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 germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”
The document contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".