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    Essays
    Essays
    Essays
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Essays

    By Percy Bysshe Shelley

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    Percy Bysshe Shelley is more widely known as one of the great Romantic Poets. Yet in his short life he was active politically but also as an essayist where his thoughts and ideas were fresh and innovative. Included in this collection is In Defence Of Poetry which contains the quite wonderful suggestion that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". By the age of 29 he was dead but his quite remarkable body of work lives on.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781780004587
    Author

    Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an English Romantic poet. Born into a prominent political family, Shelley enjoyed a quiet and happy childhood in West Sussex, developing a passion for nature and literature at a young age. He struggled in school, however, and was known by his colleagues at Eton College and University College, Oxford as an outsider and eccentric who spent more time acquainting himself with radical politics and the occult than with the requirements of academia. During his time at Oxford, he began his literary career in earnest, publishing Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810) and St. Irvine; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (1811) In 1811, he married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he lived an itinerant lifestyle while pursuing affairs with other women. Through the poet Robert Southey, he fell under the influence of political philosopher William Godwin, whose daughter Mary soon fell in love with the precocious young poet. In the summer of 1814, Shelley eloped to France with Mary and her stepsister Claire Claremont, travelling to Holland, Germany, and Switzerland before returning to England in the fall. Desperately broke, Shelley struggled to provide for Mary through several pregnancies while balancing his financial obligations to Godwin, Harriet, and his own father. In 1816, Percy and Mary accepted an invitation to join Claremont and Lord Byron in Europe, spending a summer in Switzerland at a house on Lake Geneva. In 1818, following several years of unhappy life in England, the Shelleys—now married—moved to Italy, where Percy worked on The Masque of Anarchy (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Adonais (1821), now considered some of his most important works. In July of 1822, Shelley set sail on the Don Juan and was lost in a storm only hours later. His death at the age of 29 was met with despair and contempt throughout England and Europe, and he is now considered a leading poet and radical thinker of the Romantic era.

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      Essays - Percy Bysshe Shelley

      Percy Bysshe Shelley – Essays

      In Defence Of Poetry

      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 them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within

      itself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the [word in Greek],

      or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms

      which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the [word in Greek], or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.  Reason is to the imagination as the

      instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.

      Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression

      of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

      Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal

      impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing

      wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to

      ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human

      being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise

      than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony,

      by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited

      to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could

      accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them,

      in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can

      accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play

      by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and

      every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation

      to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which

      awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;

      and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away,

      so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the

      duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the

      cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these

      expressions are, what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for

      the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the

      emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner;

      and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation,

      become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of

      his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and

      his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures

      of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented

      treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative

      arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil

      and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the

      harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from

      its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from

      the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained

      within the present, as the plant within the seed; and equality,

      diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles

      alone capable of affording the motives according to which the

      will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is

      social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment,

      beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of

      kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain

      order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects

      and the impressions represented by them, all expression being

      subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us

      dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an

      inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our

      view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its

      forms.

      In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural

      objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain

      rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they

      observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the

      melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series

      of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain

      order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic

      representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive

      an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense

      of an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern

      writers.  Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which

      approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest

      delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as

      that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances

      where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the

      beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between

      this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom

      it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the

      word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they

      express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds,

      communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort or reduplication

      from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that

      is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and

      perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent

      them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts

      instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets

      should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus

      disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of

      human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said

      by Lord Bacon to be 'the same footsteps of nature impressed upon

      the various subjects of the world'; [Footnote: De Augment. Scient.,

      cap. i, lib.  iii.] and he considers the faculty which perceives

      them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. In the

      infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because

      language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the

      true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the

      relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and

      secondly between perception and expression. Every original language

      near to its source is in itself the chaos of

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