A Defence of Poetry

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the work by Sir Philip Sidney, see An Apology for Poetry

A Defence of Poetry is an essay by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840. It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".

It was written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock's article The Four Ages of Poetry which had been published in 1820. Shelley wrote to the publishers C. and J. Ollier (who were also his own publishers):

I am enchanted with your Literary Miscellany, although the last article has excited my polemical faculties so violently that the moment I get rid of my opthalmia, I mean to set about an answer to it. . . . It is very clever, but I think, very false.'

To Peacock Shelley wrote:

Your anathemas against poetry itself excited me to a sacred rage. . . . I had the greatest possible desire to break a lance with you . . . in honour of my mistress Urania.

A Defence of Poetry was eventually published, with some edits by John Hunt, posthumously by Shelley's wife Mary in 1840.

[edit] Source

[edit] External links

[edit] From Editorial Introductions to A Defence of Poetry

Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler, eds. Gateway to the Great Books Volume 5, Critical Essays. Toronto: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1963, p.214. (No ISBN.)
In A Defence of Poetry, [Shelley] attempts to prove that poets are philosophers; that they are the creators and protectors of moral and civil laws; and that if it were not for poets, scientists could not have developed either their theories or their inventions.


Perkins, David, ed. English Romantic Writers, 2nd Edition. Toronto: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995, p.1131. ISBN 0155016881.
...Shelley was mainly concerned to explain the moral (and thus the social) function of poetry. In doing so, he produced one of the most penetrating general discussions on poetry that we have.