28 pages • 56 minutes read
Percy Bysshe ShelleyA Defence of Poetry
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1840A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Romanticism
Romanticism was a literary and poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Romantic poets reacted against the Age of Enlightenment with its focus on logic, reason, and scientific inquiry. They emphasized feeling and nature and placed more importance on imagination than reason. Romanticism produced many of the stereotypes of poets and poems that still dominate culture today, like the image of a poet as a tortured visionary and the idea of poetry as an act of spontaneous creativity. Shelley demonstrated these ideals through “A Defence of Poetry.”
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Romantic movement started, but the period is generally thought to have started in the 1780s and lasted until the 1832 Reform Act in England. British Romanticism, the specific movement that Percy Shelley belonged to, emphasized the creative spontaneity of poetry and imagination. Like most artistic ages, Romanticism was a reaction against the preceding Age of Enlightenment and the Augustan Age, which glorified the Roman emperor Augustus and the art produced in his era.
There are several main tenets of the Romantic movement. First is an emphasis on emotional and imaginative spontaneity, with the belief that imagination moved the poet and poems came from an outburst of inspiration. Shelley demonstrates this belief when he argues that poetry is not an act of will; it stems from divine inspiration.
Second, Romanticism stressed the importance of self-expression and individual feeling. Each poem should be taken as the poet’s personal feeling and opinion on that matter. Shelley espoused this idea when he talked about the importance of poetry in discussing the human experience: By putting themselves in the poets’ shoes, a reader’s imagination expands, creating empathy.
Romanticism also featured an almost religious response to nature. Many Romantic poems focus on nature, and the movement’s poets often believed nature was divine and transporting. Shelley praised this idea when discussing the poetry of early societies and how it celebrated nature’s beauty. Doing so in the current age, Shelley argues, helps transport people: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (21).
Finally, one of the biggest Romantic beliefs was that a poet is a visionary figure with an important role in society as a prophet. Shelley makes this belief clear when he characterizes poetry as eternal. A poet, he adds, is never recognized as great in his own time because his ideas are great and meant to guide society toward the future.
Historical Context: The Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, was an intellectual movement in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The central belief of the Enlightenment thinkers was that reason was the paramount sum of man’s experiences. They believed humans understood the universe and improved their condition through reason.
Thinkers like Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton all investigated different areas of reason. Reason could be applied to any question, but it had to be the correct application and methodology. The methodology of reason can be most clearly seen in what some call the hard sciences, which utilize the scientific method and mathematical models. These thinkers of the 17th century paved the way for the Enlightenment because they believed absolute truths, like the answer to a mathematical equation, could be proved through reason, independent of the Christian God’s intervention. These thinkers’ success with mathematical equations and the discovery of scientific laws, like gravity, bolstered the idea that reason was humanity’s greatest tool for attaining knowledge. This idea eroded belief in God and individual salvation, which were central to Christianity.
Early secular modern theories of psychology and ethics also came out of the Enlightenment. Philosopher John Locke discussed the idea of tabula rasa, which holds that babies are blank slates at birth, and then their experiences and culture write on them. Locke’s theory discounted the Christian beliefs of innate goodness and original sin. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed humans were driven only by their own pleasure and pain and had no interest in the greater good. Instead of the state or the church being the center of society, Hobbes’s political theories repositioned the individual so that they were no longer a servant to the state; instead, the state, embodied by the sovereign, and the individual were in a mutually beneficial relationship that protected each other’s rights.
These ideas about the value of the individual led to revolutions in America, accelerated by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson’s writings, and in France, spurred by Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas. These authors believed that the authoritarian state did not serve the individual and that individuals had inalienable rights, paving the way for modern democracy to take hold.
Some argue that the Enlightenment was relatively short-lived because the celebration of reason didn’t give people something to hope in beyond themselves. Culture shifted against the ideas of empirical reason into the world of emotion and nature during the Romantic era. Shelley himself reacted strongly to the idea of reason being the pinnacle of humanity’s experiences in “A Defence of Poetry” by arguing that imagination is greater than reason. Reason is not the sum of all human experience, but imagination is—because it uses reason to expand humanity’s horizons.
Source: Duignan, Brian. “Enlightenment.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 Oct. 2021.
Related Titles
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
