April 2025 Poetry Month Display Photo 03

Abstract

Image of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) wrote a famouse defense of poetry. Shelley turns to reason and imagination, defining reason as logical thought and imagination as perception, adding, “reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.” From reason and imagination, man may recognize beauty, and it is through beauty that civilization comes. Language, Shelley contends, shows humanity’s impulse toward order and harmony, which leads to an appreciation of unity and beauty. Those in “excess” of language are the poets, whose task it is to impart the pleasures of their experience and observations into poems. Shelley argues, that civilization advances and thrives with the help of poetry. This assumption then, through Shelley’s own understanding, marks the poet as a prophet, not a man dispensing forecasts but a person who “participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” He goes on to place poetry in the column of divine and organic process: “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth . . . the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator.” The task of poets then is to interpret and present the poem; Shelley’s metaphor here explicates: “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” (poetry Foundation entry on Shelley. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetryhttps://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/poetry-month-2025-photos/1005/thumbnail.jp