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A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

P >> Percy Bysshe Shelley >> A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays




But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible
order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the
dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the
institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the
inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a
certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial
apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is
called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or
susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of
false and true. 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: a poet essentially comprises
and unites both these characters. 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. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in
the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell 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. A poet participates
in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to
his conceptions, time and place and number are not. 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; and the choruses of
Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford,
more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits
of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture,
painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.

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 effect as a
synonym of the cause. 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. And this springs from the nature
itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the
actions and 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 control of that
faculty of which it is the creation. 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 The former is as a mirror which reflects,
the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are
mediums of communication. 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. The fame of legislators and founders of religions,
so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of
poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question,
whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the
gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with
that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets,
any excess will remain.

We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that
art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of
the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle
still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured
and unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and
verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.

Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other
and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order
of those relations has always been found connected with a perception
of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of
poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence
of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely
less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the
words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. 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. The plant must spring again from its seed,
or it will bear no flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of
Babel.

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of 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. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet
should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the
harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice 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. The distinction
between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction
between philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was
essentially a poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the
melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible
to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and
lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts
divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular
plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the
varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence
of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.
[Footnote: See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Death
particularly]. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which
satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom
of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which
distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind,
and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element
with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions
in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors,
nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things
by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their
periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves
the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are
those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm
on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable
of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who
have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine
ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest
power.

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.
There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story
is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion
than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is 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. The one is partial, and applies only
to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events
which can never again recur; the other 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. Time, which
destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts,
stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of
poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the
eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called
the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story
of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that
which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful
that which is distorted.

The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition
as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be a considered as
a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
portions: a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable
thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch,
Livy, were poets; and although, the plan of these writers, especially
that of Livy, restrained them; from developing this faculty in
its highest degree, they made copious and ample amends for their
subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with
living images.

Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed
to estimate its effects upon society.

Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it
falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with
its delight. 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; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate
and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and
splendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living poet ever
arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgement
upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed
of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of
the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sits
in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds;
his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen
musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not
whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the
delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social
system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization
has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in
human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses
were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector,
and Ulysses the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and
persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in
these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have
been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely
impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation
they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration.
Nor let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moral
perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying
patterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names more
or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the
naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit
is the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety
lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries
as a temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and
which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their
beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them
around his soul, as he may the ancient armour or the modern uniform
around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful
than either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far
concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its
form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate
the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic
form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most
barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest class
have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its
naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy
of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary
music for mortal ears.

The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests
upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce
the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements
which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes
examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable
doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive,
and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner
manner. 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; it reproduces all
that it represents, and the 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. The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our
own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man,
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. The great
instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers
to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the
circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thought of
ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating
to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals
and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry
strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature
of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. 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 By this assumption of the
inferior office of interpreting the effect in which perhaps after
all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a
glory in a participation in the cause. There was little danger that
Homer, or any of the eternal poets should have so far misunderstood
themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion.
Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense,
as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a
moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact
proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this
purpose.



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; architecture, painting, music
the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of
civil life. For although the scheme of Athenian society was deformed
by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry and
Christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modern
Europe; yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty,
and virtue, been developed; never was blind strength and stubborn
form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or
that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the
true, as during the century which preceded the death of Socrates.
Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we records
and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in
man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language,
which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and the
storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For written poetry
existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is
an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light,
which all, as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkest
periods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause and effect than
a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexist
with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection
of man. I appeal to what has already been established to distinguish
between the cause and the effect.

It was at the period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth;
and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed
those few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been
preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was
understood or practised according to the true philosophy of it,
as at Athens. For the Athenians employed language, action, music,
painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to produce a common
effect in the representation of the highest idealisms of passion
and of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind
by artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into
a beautiful proportion and unity one towards the other. On the modern
stage a few only of the elements capable of expressing the image
of the poet's conception are employed at once. We have tragedy
without music and dancing; and music and dancing without the highest
impersonations of which they are the fit accompaniment, and both
without religion and solemnity. Religious institution has indeed
been usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting the
actor's face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriated
to his dramatic character might be moulded into one permanent
and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial and
inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where
all the attention may be directed to some great master of ideal
mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy,
though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly
an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be
as in KING LEAR, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
intervention of this principle which determines the balance in
favour of KING LEAR against the OEDIPUS TYRANNUS or the AGAMEMNON,
or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless
the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the
latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. KING
LEAR, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the
most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world;
in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected
by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed
in modern Europe. Calderon, in his religious AUTOS, has attempted
to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic representation
neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation
between the drama and religion and the accommodating them to music
and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still
more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution
of the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted
superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human
passion.

But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally
recognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in
its most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected
with good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has
been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetry
employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners
whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the
other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example
of moral cause and effect.

The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached
to its perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual
greatness of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are
as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin
disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection
and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that
he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is enlarged
by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend
in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived;
the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror,
and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of
this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life: even
crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being
represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies
of nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men can no
longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama of
the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it
teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye
nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it
resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is
as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest
rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the
simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty
and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with
the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.

But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes
with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of
the great masterpieces 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. Hence
what has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison's
CATO is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous
to cite examples of the other! To such purposes poetry cannot be
made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed,
which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. And thus we
observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative
in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion, which,
divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite.
The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the
drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in which poetry
had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of
kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating
an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle
pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases
to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:
wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph,
instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed to
sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we Obscenity, which
is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from
the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it
is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings
forth new food, which it devours in secret.

The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes
of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any
other, the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable
in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable
that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded
with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the
extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished,
is a mark of a corruption of manners and an extinction of the
energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli
says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and
renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama
to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in its
most extended sense: all language, institution and form, require not
only to be produced but to be sustained: the office and character
of a poet participates in the divine nature as regards providence,
no less than as regards creation.

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