A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

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




We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know
how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
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.
There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best
in morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what
is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we
let '_I_ DARE NOT wait upon I WOULD, like the poor cat in the adage.'
We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we
want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the
poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have
eaten more than we can digest. 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. To what but a cultivation
of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence
of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge,
is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and
combining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind?
From what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should
have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam?
Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible,
incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.

The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; 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. 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. The body has then become too
unwieldy for that which animates it.

Poetry is indeed something divine. 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. It is at the same
time the root and 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. It is the perfect and consummate surface
and bloom of all 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. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship--what
were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what
were our consolations on this side of 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? Poetry is not like reasoning, a
power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A
man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' 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 force, 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. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day,
whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of
poetry are produced by labour and study. 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
connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture
of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the
limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived
the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions; We
have his own authority also for the muse having 'dictated' to him
the 'unpremeditated song'. And let this be an answer to those who
would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of
the Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry what
mosaic is to painting. 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.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds. 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 unforeseen
and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all
expression; so that even in the desire and regret they leave, there
cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature
of its object. 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. These and corresponding
conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the
most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the
state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire.
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 a universe. 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 ethereal 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.
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.

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. 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.

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.' But 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 life's 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 reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and
percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity
which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to
feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It
creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our
minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.
It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso: Non merita nome di
creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.

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. 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. That
he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch 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.
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', are reprehensible. Let
us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer,
that Horace was a coward, that Tasso a madman, that Lord Bacon was
a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet
laureate. 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. 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. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos
the imputation of real or fictitious crime have been confused in
the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how
little is, as it appears--or appears, as it is; look to your own
motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.

Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that
it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind,
and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with
the consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that
these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when
mental effects are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to
them. The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious
to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony
correlative with its own nature and its effects upon other minds.
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. 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. 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.

But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus
cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have
never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives
of poets.

I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down
these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested
to my mind, by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of
observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which
they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation
of the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the first
division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have
moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel
with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwilling
to be stunned, by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day.
Bavius and Maevius undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable
persons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish
rather than confound.

The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its
elements and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow
limits assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in
a restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order
and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are
susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in a universal
sense.

The second part will have for its object an application of these
principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and
a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and
opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative
and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic
development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and
free development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a
new birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue
contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual
achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets
as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last
national struggle for civil and religious liberty. 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.
At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating
and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man
and nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far
as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent
correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are
the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet
compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of
their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the
most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled
with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure
the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a
comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for
it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. 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 moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of
the world.

THE END

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.