Percy Bysshe Shelley and his literary works

Percy Bysshe Shelley

One of the foundational defenses within Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defense of Poetry is that poetry cannot be judged as if it were a moral statement by its author. Shelley demands that poetry of the past and present not be judged and discounted on the basis of its proper moral message, as didacticism poisons its expression as a form of art and can potentially hurt its message by allowing contemporary readers to divert the message into his or her own contemporary meanings. Through this message Shelley argues that morality, should be left to the philosophers to discuss and in a sense contends that poetry cannot serve as philosophy as its main purpose is not to dissect the intricacies of universal or contextual morality, which can be said of philosophy, but to exercise the mind through messages of love, the expression of morality. Poetry is to Shelley an exercise that broadens the mind so that the reader and the author can better understand the need to go against one's self serving nature and express love.

He contends that within each work, there are likely persons or situations that the reader can aspire to and yet it is also clear that poetry is an artistic expression of one author's perceptions of a character or situation, including within the faults of that particular character as well as the human characteristics for which aspiration is built. Shelley, contends that the value of poetry is not in its moral message, and in so saying that didacticism is a faulty lens for which to judge poetry.

The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. (51)

Shelley goes on to say that poetry can drive morality, but not as a direct guide to such but as a way that enlarges the capacity of the human mind to imagine itself, acting in a manner that befits the love that guides morality. Poetry is therefore not the didactic but the exercise put forth for the mind to strengthen its ability to conceive of the right and wrong in the world, and among men. Love, guides morality and morality is an expression of the individual who has gained enough knowledge to conceive of how to express morality through moral love, including the love of one's country, the love of one's lover, the love of one's siblings, the love of the land and the environment and so forth. Poetry guides the mind through the exercise of the expression of value and fault so the mind can then place those ideals into a concept of the love that must guide morality, in his or her own social, political and moral context, rather than in the context of the poet, who could have lived hundreds or even thousands of years before the reader has sat down in his or her chair or on the grass under an idyllic tree to read the work. In the next passage, Shelley expresses the idea that the nature of man is not moral (or loving) but selfish and vain, therefore one must exercise the mind through poetry to be able to express a set of values that are contrary to his or her nature but moral and right in the world.

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. 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. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thought 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 interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. (51-52)

According to Shelly the poet who aspires to place his own ideas of the right and wrong of his particular place and time is in error, as these situations and contexts may change the whole of the perception, as they will surely be different at a later time, and possibly even unknown to the reader. The context of language is the best example of such an expression of how meanings can change at any given time to alter the overall meaning of a work. Translation, from one language to another or even into contemporary expressions of the same language as something that was written many years before can entirely alter the message of the work and create a complete or partial misunderstanding of the "moral" message of the work. This might bring to mind the example of the bible, as a complete work, the controversy over its expression as mutable through millions of possible variations over just short of 2,000 years leaves it open, more so in the past than presently yet, translations and interpretations are still being made that could change the message of the "message, to interpretation and didactic reasoning.

Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither By this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in the cause. (52)

Shelley's conception of poetry was one that expanded the mind through imagery, making the usual seem fantastic and the fantastic seem usual, rather than the expression of an idea of morality. Defending poetry from those who would attack it on the grounds that it does not meet some sort of contextual message of morality. In so doing the author removes him or herself from the challenges of censorship and the potential censor.

In history there have been many cases of literature being lost, as it was stricken from the library of human knowledge on the grounds that it was amoral in the present state of the world. In the next passage it is just such a message Shelley is expressing. Giving vague reference to a movement of poetry that does not follow the guide of anti-didacticism and ends by altering the fiber of moral reasoning.

Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of civil life. For although the scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue, been developed; never was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which preceded the death of Socrates. (52)

Shelley finds fault in an entire poetic lineage based on the fact that it has been altered by convention in many different contexts and also had its meaning falsified by didacticism and moralistic reasoning. The challenge is then to those who consider poetry, written as a form of art to fall into the category of philosophy, a form of logic with a completely different purpose.

We know no more of cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. I appeal to what has already been established to distinguish between the cause and the effect. (53)

The next logical line of reasoning, for Shelley is that the reflection of a cause and effect are relationship, when poetry is translated to theatrics is a result of the poetry being taken out of its true form, one that is only accessible to the individual mind conceiving it or reading it, to one where it is the guidance for action.

The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally recognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected with good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetry employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and effect. (54)

In this message Shelley connects the universal idea that poetry, once translated into the theatrical creates a natural transition into a cause and effect relationship but that the poetry itself is also flawed in that translation and that even this form of art cannot perfectly represent the moral, cause and effect situation.

A under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. (54-55)

Shelley then goes on to say that the foundation of the proverb that life imitates art is actually the reverse, in that art imitates art. Art, in this case the theatrical is a reflection of the social and moral condition of the time in which it is conceived and/or displayed for the masses. According to Shelley in times of social depravity and poor moral conduct, art becomes a reflection of this, not the other way around. "But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay." (55) Depravity is present in the moral conduct of the time and is therefore represented in art, in a sense as a way to connect to the audience, as art is best received, when the individual feels connected to it, or believes it to be in some way a reflection of him or herself, with or without consciousness of it. "Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles." In times of social greatness, reflected in other arts the dramatic and the poetic reflect such times and such meanings.

A it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. (55)

To Shelley poetry is the universal expression of all that is good in the world of evil men. It responds to the social world in that it reflects aspirations and the right action but it does not demand or determine such, nor does it prove or represent real actions of man.

Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time. (56-57)

Shelley contends that through poetry, people can learn a great deal about their own ability to exercise their mind beyond the standard of the natural, a mind ineloquently and unknowingly responding only to his or her own desires, wants and needs and not to those of others. Yet, for Shelley art reflects life, not the contrary. Wisdom can be gained through the true form of universal poetry, that is the form that speaks to the soul, with regard to the love that drives morality.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, likely had more to say about what poetry is than almost any other modern writer. His Defense of Poetry demonstrates a keen and self possessed idea about the value of the art of poetry, for the reader/viewer in the case of the dramatic and for the poet, who is driven by some inner need to express concepts, he or she may not even understand. Poetry is the simplest form of truth, given by Shelley the auspices of the prophetic. To Shelley, poetry feeds the hungry soul and mind by allowing the reader, viewer and poet to see and experience, the greatest expressions of humanity the expressions of love that drive morality.

Shelley puts poetry in league with scripture in that he calls the poet a hierophant, or the guide who brings the masses to that which is deemed holy.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

The poet as the unacknowledged legislator of the world, brings to mind the idea of poetry as a social constitution, a living document that embodies the greatest affirmations of a civil society, but in the sense of the social world, where people intermingle with each other and with their environment to and come to surprising terms with both, in both a good and a bad way at times.

In the most general sense of the word, Shelley believes that poetry, is a reflection of the context of its time, and of the individual who expresses it. To Shelley, poetry is the lifeblood of social expression. The response of the individual to know and understand love, the driving force behind morality and human goodness, a goodness tha is not inherent, but rather learned through the full expression of his knowledge, about people, place and thing as well as the divine. When speaking of modern poets, Shelley expresses that they are confronted with the electrified world and must navigate it to express themselves in poetry.

They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. (73)

Poets, though gifted with a clear sense of self, while expressing poetry are according to Shelly the purveyors of messages that are separate from the logic that drives didactic thought. Poetry is then an expression of the divine.

Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputation of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how little is, as it appears -- or appears, as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged. Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with the consciousness or will. (71)

Poetry is something that flows from within and almost has a will of its own. A will that is then expressed through the pen and forever folded into the greater body of the knowledge of man. Shelley contends that poetry is not driven by motive, or self-interest, and if it is it cannot be considered poetry, in its truest form. The poet writes what is given to him or her, with some skill and application of words, but without the desire to prove a point or manipulate knowledge or understanding. Poetry "just is."

All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. (70)

Poetry, to Shelly is the link between the fantastic and the mundane. Shelley, would say that poetry invigorates our mind to step away from complacency and create our world, anew through perception. As the mind is a powerful tool and it can make or break the individual with just the suggestion of failure or success, perceived through witnessing the mundane occurrences of life, which bear down upon us through a gauzy curtain of knowledge. In the simplest terms, to Shelley, poetry is truth. Shelley contends the poetry is the food of the soul and mind, that which makes it stronger so that real knowledge, beyond perception can be obtained and the real and true moral action can take place within the mind and be reflected in action.

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. 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. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thought 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 interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. (51-52)

The foundation of the good of the human soul is fed by poetry, and Shelley confirms this by reflecting the existence of poetry in every written era. Through an exhaustive explanation of the sublimity of historical poetry, he demonstrates that in the greatest of times, the art (poetry) reflected the great and in the worst of times it reflected the worst in man.

But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. (52-53)