Shelley's Defences of Poetry

Abstract

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a poet who possessed, in his own words, “the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.” 2 Yet the greatness of his poetry, this essay will argue, does not essentially reside in his capacity to articulate his strong libertarian beliefs. These beliefs may be the ground of his conscious intellectual being. They show the influence of many thinkers, including that enshrined in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), written by his father-in-law, William Godwin. But the supposition that Shelley uses poetry as the vehicle for the endorsement of a system of ideas is fundamentally erroneous, as he himself argues in two important places for understanding his poetics: the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, where he asserts that “Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (232) and A Defence of Poetry, where he develops a sophisticated theory of poetry’s primary appeal to the imagination and argues that “A Poet ... 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” (682).