The Defense of Poetry

     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 to 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 to the ideal world or platonic world. He argues that all forms of arts and science depend up on nature but poetry improves the nature and creates better than it. Here, his views share similarities with Aristotle, who said that a poet is not only an imitator but also a creator.

     Reason and imagination are the two faculties of mind. Reason breaks the things in to parts and analyses it. Thus the reason is the principle of analysis. On the other hand, imagination synthesizes the components. Since imagination is the principle of synthesis that can false contradictory forces.

     Imagination has soothing power that pacifies the mind and the people become moral. It creates the best mind and the happiest moment so, peaceful mind is required to produce the poetry.For Shelley the best mind and the happiest moment, produced by imagination are the ways to get the essence but Coleridge’s imagination does not soothe the mind, instead it is just a creative force.

     Shelley believes that poetry strengthens the moral faculty and gives pleasure so he treats imagination both as creative and pragmatic aspects.The poet is a moral teacher who gives idea and pleasure to the society by teaching indirectly. Poet is a prophet and legislator who create social norms rules and moral lessons with the help of poetry.A poet to him is not only the author of language of music of the dance, and of architecture but is also the legislator of laws the founder of civil society. Thus, poetry, unlike to Peacock has its social and moral functions along with its aesthetic pleasure.

     In this way, Shelley defends poetry from the charges made by Peacock, for whom poets are no more than semi- barbarians do. Shelley opposes peacocks idea that romantic use of language brings cultural decadence and reinforces that poetry creates novelty where we can see the seed of revolution.

William Wordsworth      William Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads" is a major expression of the spirit of English Romanticism. This present essay simply shifts emphasis from the relationship between poem and reader to that between poet and poem. But it does not mean that Wordsworth gives up the concern for his reader. He is deep interested in speaking to the reader by the moral effect of his work. Nevertheless, he defines the poem primarily in term of its author's creative activity. He approaches the idea of poem after discussing the idea of poet. In this sense, a poet is a man who speaks to men; he has great knowledge of human nature, and a mass comprehensive soul.It is true that a poet is endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness. Read More...

Samuel T. Coleridge     The essay is a tribute to Shakespeare who possesses all the qualities and conditions of a true poet. Coleridge tries to unveil some misconceptions popular about Shakespeare by formulating some romantic conceptions. He is a genius who well expressed himself in his dramas and poems. The ideas that he was immoral are totally groundless.The organic form he exposes is true to his genius for it is innate that shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its devolvement is one and the some with the perfection of its outward form.Shakespeare himself is nature... Read More...

Charles Baudelaire      Baudelaire is a French Romanticist and the precursor of symbolic movement in European literature. He considers imagination as the “queen of faculties”, truly creative power. The imagination must shape what nature makes.... Read More...

John Keats      Last Poet of a Romantic period, John Keats' critical speculation is found in his letters, which he wrote to different persons in different walks of life. He believes in sensation rather than thought. Later he is also known as sensuous poet. He is sensuous poet because he makes use of that poetic image, which directly affects... Read More...

Edward Young      Conjectures on Original Composition primarily attack the subject. Young distinguishes' originals' from 'imitations' the former far better than the latter despite the former is fewer in number. Read More...

Friedrich Schlegel     Schlegel is the leading German Romantic theorist. He was the editor of the periodical Anthenaeum(1798-1800). They published a variety of thoughts literary, morals philosophical, political and other critical fragments. In Schlegel's critical essays, we find a sense of Romantic ideas. These ideas are the initial expression of Romanticism. Read More...

Friedrich Von Schelling     Schelling is a German-Idealist, in the post Kantian development in German philosophy. He rejects Kant’s idea that' things in themselves' are unknown. Instead he posited a subject and object that are joined in aesthetic activity. This joining is a creative act. Man's creativity is analogous to the unconscious creativity of nature. Read More...