Richard L. W.

Clarke LITS2002 Notes 08

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY A DEFENCE OF POETRY (1821) Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. 516-529. What Are Poets? Read

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from According to one mode . . . (p. 516) to . . . still more decisive. (p.517); from Poetry is indeed something divine . . . (p.527) to . . . the most enlarged imagination (p. 527); and from A poet, as he is the author . . . (p.528) to . . . unacknowledged legislators of the world. (p.529).

In order to understand the nature of the poet, Shelley believes, like Wordsworth, that he must first address the nature of human beings and of the mind in particular. Some have argued that Shelley evinces an apparently Kantian view of consciousness, positing the existence of a transcendental self that is not subject to the shaping forces of the environment external to man. Indeed, some have even stressed the influence on Shelley of Kants heirs, the so-called German Idealists Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, whom Coleridge deeply admired. From this perspective, some doubt that Shelley actually wrote the Defence which was published posthumously by his wife and is in conflict with the nihilist bent of his poetry and other prose writings. Shelley begins by comparing mans mind to an aeolian lyre (or harp), a musical instrument which, like chimes, makes sounds in response to the wind which blows over its strings. The mind, he says, is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternation of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever changing melody (my emphasis; 516). In other words, comparing humans to harps, Shelley argues that the mind (the lyre) produces conscious thought (the melody) partly in response to external impetuses (the wind; the external impressions) and partly in response to internal impetuses (the internal impressions derived from transcendental sources). Shelley calls the part of our mind which is shaped by external impressions and which is responsible for conscious thought our reason. However, Shelley argues that, unlike harps, there is a part of mans mind which is responsible for adding harmony on top of these melodies: there is also a principle within the human being, and perhaps 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. (516) Where conscious thought furnished by the reason consists of a sequence of ideas, it is the Imagination which allows idea to be layered harmoniously and simultaneously on idea, in other words, it allows for connections, links, associations and combinations between ideas but otherwise unnoticed to be intuited. (This is a very different use of the term intuition [i.e. a spiritual insight of some kind] from Aristotles definition of it as merely the direct sensory apprehension of something.) Ultimately, these connections posited are of a very different kind from what Lockeans might term the association of ideas: the Imagination permits insights of a spiritual nature (of which the reason is incapable) into the true nature of reality. Shelley explores in greater detail the difference between the reason and the Imagination, which are both classes of mental action (516) or faculties or functions of the mind, found in each human being. He defines reason as the mind contemplating the

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relations borne by one thought to another, however produced (516). The reason is, in other words, concerned with the logical processes of critical reasoning and argumentation to arrive at the truth of things. It is, to this end, preoccupied with analysis (516) or understanding worldly phenomena by dissecting them, splitting them into their constitutive elements. By contrast, the Imagination is mind acting upon those thoughts [produced by the reason] so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts (my emphasis; 516). In other words, the Imagination is responsible for a higher level of thought than the reason and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself (516). That is, the Imagination sees beyond the physical world to the essences or ideal forms of which physical phenomena, in the Platonist scheme of things, are merely imperfect replicas. The Imagination is, as such, concerned with synthesis (516) or conceptualising the unification of phenomena where reason perceives only distinctions: where reason respects the differences (516), the Imagination perceives the similitudes of things (516); it accordingly marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure; eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things (527). All in all, the Imagination is superior to reason, making use of and building upon but also exceeding it: [r]eason is to the imagination, as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance (516). Arguing that knowledge is subjective, that all things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the percipient (527), the mind being able to make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven (527), Shelley contends that poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws lifes dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It . . . purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. . . . It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. (527-528) This is why he argues that the creative faculty is the basis of all knowledge (526). Arguing that we have more moral, political and historical wisdom (526) and more scientific and economical knowledge (526) than we know what to do with and that the poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes (526527), Shelley asserts that what we lack is the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; . . . the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life (526). He contends that the cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. (526) The function of the poetic faculty is two-fold, he stresses: it creates new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure (526) and it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange (526) these materials according to a certain rhythm and order which might be called the beautiful and the good (526). Because the Imagination is the most important mental faculty, in Shelleys view, responsible for composing a poem, the creative process is not one that can be consciously controlled. Creativity is not like the reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will (527). One cannot say that I will compose poetry (527). As a result, he agues that the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an

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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. (527) Poetry is the product of inspiration, emanating from within and over which the conscious portion of our mind (or reason) has little control. Poets are compelled to serve (529) that regal power which is seated on the throne of their own soul (529). He concludes that it is, therefore, an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study (527). Rather, he writes, we are conscious only of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden but elevating and delightful beyond all expression (526). 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 morning calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. (527) Such conditions of being (527), he avers, are experienced mostly by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination (527). For Shelley, because of their power to envision an alternative world, poets are more than mere writers: they are institutors of laws, . . . founders of civil society, . . . inventors of the arts of life, . . . teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world (517) which we normally call religion. Shelley terms them legislators (517) and prophets (517) because 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 germ of the flower and the fruit of the latest time (517). What Is Poetry?

Read from "Language, colour, form, . . ." (p. 517) to ". . . living images" (p. 519).

Having defined the poet, Shelley turns his attention to comprehending the nature of poetry. In a famous definition which signals a definitive shift towards the author-oriented or expressive model of literature which comes to predominate from about 1900, Shelley argues that poetry is the expression of the imagination (516) of the poet. He admits that reason evidently plays a part too: [l]anguage, color, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry (517). In other words, at least at one level, poetry makes use of media like words and is an imitation of human actions and behaviour. Poetry is in short, to some degree at least , a mirror held up to the physical world, as Wordsworth argues. These are all functions within the province of the reason. However, poetry does more than this: poets, using their Imagination, imagine and express (my emphasis; 517) an indestructible order (517). This is because the poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one (517). Poetry is, from this point of view, the main portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit . . . into the universe of things (527) and, as such, the echo of the eternal music (518). For this reason, poetry is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth (518): it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms (527). Its words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth (518). This is why Shelley speaks of poets as communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature (529) and functioning thereby to measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-

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penetrating spirit (529). Shelley accordingly ranks literature in general and poetry in particular above all other art forms such as the visual arts, the plastic arts (sculpture), or dance. This is because poetry 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 (517) which he calls the Imagination. Poetry, in other words, is the medium by which the Imagination, that sovereign faculty within man which links him to beyond the physical world, expresses itself. This fact springs from the nature itself of language (517) which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations (517) and is more plastic and obedient of the faculty of which it is the creation (517) than other media of representation found in other artforms such as color, form, or motion (517). Shelley also elevates poetry above prose fiction, even though the latter also utilises words. He spends some time distinguishing between prose fiction and poetry, or as he puts it, measured and unmeasured language (518). The difference lies not merely in the fact that one is written in verse while the other is not. Where a story (518) (prose fiction) is merely a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect (518), poetry is by contrast 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 (518). Where prose fiction is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur (518), poetry is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature (518). Where prose fiction is nothing more than a story of particular facts (519) and, as such, a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful (519), poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted (519). Poetry, Shelley famously asserts, is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds (527). It 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 (527). It redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man (527) because it turns all things to loveliness (527). Shelley also stresses that, because of their subject matter, the highest forms of poetry are not easily fathomable. They are, in fact, infinitely suggestive and evocative in a way that makes it very difficult to pinpoint meaning precisely: All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight. (525) In so saying, Shelley anticipates the point of view on poetry of the neo-romantic Modernist Yeats upon whom he was very influential. Poetrys Beneficial Effects Upon Society Read

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from "Having determined what is poetry . . ." (p.519) to " . . . advert to this purpose" (p. 520); and from "But let us not be betrayed . . ." (p. 525) to " . . . impressions blunted by reiteration" (p. 528).

Shelley, like so many before him, also responds to Platos invitation to rescue poetry from

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exile by arguing that it performs a beneficial moral function. Having discussed who are poets (519) and what is poetry (519), Shelley proceeds to focus on its effects upon society (519). Shelley responds to the claim that while the exercise of the imagination is most delightful (525), that of reason is more useful (525). He does so by equating utility (525) with both pleasure (525) and good (525) and defining pleasure as that which the consciousness of a sensitive and intelligent being seeks (525). He argues that there are two kinds of pleasure: one durable, universal and permanent; the other transitory and particular (525). The former strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense (525). The latter performs a much narrower (525) function in that it merely banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage (525). There is room in society for persons who are concerned with propagating the latter, much more limited (525) form of pleasure, but they merely follow in the footsteps of poets (525) who are concerned with the production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense (526) which is poetrys true utility (526). Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or poetical philosophers (526). Shelley argues that the whole objection . . . of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man (519). Poetry produces pleasure (519) but not of the sort produced by tragedy ([s]orrow, terror, anguish, despair . . . are often the chosen expression of an approximation to the highest good [526]) or the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody (526). Rather, all spirits upon which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight (519). Poetry acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness (519). Pointing out that it is not for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another (519), Shelley contends that poetry acts in another and diviner manner (519): It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. . . . [T]he impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. (519) The great secret of morals is love (519), Shelley writes, that is, a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own (519). A man, he argues, in order 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 (519). This is why he contends that the great instrument of moral good is the imagination (520). Poetry, he asserts, administers to the effect [i.e. the propagation of good] by acting upon the cause [i.e. by moulding the readers imagination] (520), enlarging the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts (520). Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man (520) in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb (520). This is why Shelley counsels against openly moralising in poetry (the effect of . . . poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose [520]) and against making particular ethical claims: the poets conceptions of right and wrong . . . are usually those of his place and time (520), rather than universals.

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The state of mind produced (527) by poetry, Shelley argues, is one at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions (527). Poets colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world (527) as a result of which 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 (527). Poetry makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing 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. (527) Poetry, Shelley continues, 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. 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. (527) Arguing that the blossoming of literature has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national will (529), he contends that the present period is the latest to engage in a national struggle for civil and religious liberty (529) and that poetry is the unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion, or institution (529). This is why Shelley argues that philosophers like Locke and Voltaire perform important functions but it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived (526). It is impossible, however, to calculate the moral condition of the world (526) had poets like Shakespeare not lived: the human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements [on the part of poets], have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now tempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself. (526)