A Defence of Poetry Summary - eNotes.com.
Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry. 1) According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from.
As Shelley explains in his essay A Defence of Poetry, he believes that poetry expands and nurtures the imagination, and that the imagination enables sympathy, and that sympathy, or an understanding of another human being’s situation, is the basis of moral behavior. His belief that poetry can contribute to the moral and social improvement of mankind impacts his poems in several ways.
Analysis of Defense of Poetry. Steve Budd Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Shelley was born in 1792 in Sussex England, Shelley would become one of the finest poets of the Romantic period. He was brought up under very privileged circumstance and attending Syon House Academy at the age of ten, Eton at the age of twelve and would later attend Oxford University (Penn par 1). It was at this time he would.
Shelley was prompted to write A Defence of Poetry, one of the most eloquent justifications of poetry ever written, after reading Peacock’s 1820 essay “The Four Ages of Poetry,” in which his friend had lightheartedly taken a cyclical view of poetry and history and had reached the conclusion that poetry was in decline, with the current age representing one of the low points in the cycle.
Quotes from A Defence of Poetry “(Poetry) strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bear the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.” — 5 likes “Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world” — 1 likes.
This is Shelley’s intermediate fair copy of A Defence of Poetry, showing the essay’s great peroration. Mary Shelley later wrote out a fair copy and sent it to England for publication. The essay was not, however, published until 1839, in Mary’s own edition of Shelley’s prose.
Introduction: The unfinished critical work A Defence of Poetry (written 1821; published 1840), was originally written, as its title suggests, in a polemic vein, as an answer to Peacock's The Four Ages of Poetry. In its published form, much of the controversial matter was cast out, and only one or two indications remain of its controversial nature. The essay as it stands is among the most.