A Defence of Poetry(Shelley): Emphasis on imagination

P. B. Shelley, a great Romantic poet and critic, defends poetry by claiming that the poet creates human values and imagines the forms that shape the social and cultural order. Unlike Peacock, for Shelley, each poetic mind recreates its own private universe and poets, thus are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. For Shelley, Poetry is the vehicle to reach the ideal world or platonic world. He argues that all forms of arts and science depend upon nature but poetry improves nature and creates better than it.

            

          The distinction between reason and imagination is akin to the distinction between quality and quantity. We acknowledge the significance of each, all the while holding one in higher regard compared to the other. Reason is a lesser faculty, but it is necessary and instrumental to imagination. Reason implies a mechanical knowledge of things. However, until the imagination allows us to recognize the importance of such facts, they hold no value. It is the soul to the mere vessel of the body. One is inextricably linked with the other.

         In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, excercises and expands the imagination and imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest upon the ability to project oneself into the position of another person. He writes,

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.

        Shelley says, the great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumstance of imagination by replenishing it with the thoughts 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 intensifies whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, just as excercise strengthens a limb.

        No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art’s sensual pleasures to improve society as Shelley. Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the same time.