Patrick Mooney
General Theory Reading Group
11 November 2010
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. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.—Percy Shelley,
A Defence of Poetry(Richter 361)
Reason is analytic, and regards the relations of things, simply as relations [. . .] as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results.
(346)
Imagination is synthetic, mind acting upon [. . .] thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts.
(346) [I]t is not subject to the controul of the active powers of the mind [. . .] its birth and recurrence has no necessary connexion with consciousness or will.
(362) It is made synonymous with Poetry several times (e.g. at the end of 347).
Poetry is useful insofar as it strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense,
which produced pleasure durable, universal, and permanent.
(358) Pleasure is loosely defined (or rather delimited) on 359: the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. […]
a sword of lighting (353)a spark (358)light and fire (360)a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness (360)a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb. (360)Wide definition: Those in whom the predominance of [the] faculty of approximation to the beautiful
exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word
(347). Poetry is also the primary expression of the Imagination (348).
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.
(362)
More restricted definition: 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 contained with the invisible nature of man.
(348) Note that Shelley prefers the nomenclature metrical/not metrical
to prose/verse.
(348)
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 of portions of classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts.
(348)
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.
(348) 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 creations, which participate in neither.
(351)
a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound
(349)
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.
(349)
Poetry and philosophy are harmonious with each other. Plato, Cicero, and Bacon were poets, argues Shelley, while Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton were philosophers. (349) Poetry is harmonious with history in the same way. (350) (See also 354.)
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. [. . .] 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.
(349)
Poems should be structurally matched to their content, and formal innovation should occur when a true poet is writing. 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.
(352)
True
epic poets: Homer, Dante, Milton (357).
Other definitions of poetry: something divine,
at once the centre and circumference of knowledge
(360);the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds
(360); many others. Probably the most frequent quote from the essay is this definition, from the very end:
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 mores. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.
(363)
The poet 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.
(362)
the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communications itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community.
(347)
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure.
(350) The proper judges of poetry are poets, not critics (350).
Poetry's didactic function: poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. [. . .] It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.
(351) In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
(353) It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves.
(356)
Socioeconomic (and other moral) woes are the result of a failure to appreciate Poetry: We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practise; we have more scientific and œcconomical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. [. . .]
(359) Also: it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderón, nor Milton, had ever existed [. . .]
(359)
the savage is to the ages what the child is to years
(347)
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.
(347)
In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry.
(348)
In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness
(350)
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the dramatic and lyrical Poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the poetical faculty.
(351)
Is essentially a re-reading of the history of poetry under Shelley's own rubric, disagreeing with his friend. The section can be mined for quotes if so desired. There are plenty of encomia that support a rather (to us, not to Shelley) traditional canon.
Note that Shelley has a critical concept that believes the function of the critic is to make distinctions re: canonicity (362).
Classical Athenian drama: (351-352)