Percy Bysshe Shelley Defends Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley Defends Poetry

“While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry.” – Office of the First Lady, in regards to the cancellation of a poetry symposium. (Benson)

In “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley puts forth the claim that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” (810). Although Mrs. Bush might disagree, Shelley argues convincingly in favor of such a position. To deny poets their right to speak to that which is political would be in essence denying them their existence as poets. Poets must fulfill this role, according to Shelley, because out of all people, they are most capable of doing so. In his own poetry, specifically the poem “Sonnet: England in 1819,” Shelley strives for a goal no different than that of the poets who participated in “A National Day Against War.” The preamble to Shelley’s remarks, written by the editor, best categorizes what good poets can and must do: “awaken readers’ minds to higher values” and get them to take action (801).

In a recent article in The San Francisco Chronicle, Sam Hamill, a poet who made a call to arms for anti-war poetry, said to reporter Heidi Benson that he “had to make a statement.” The word had here implies that Hamill did not have a choice in the matter, that his place in society both as an American and a poet compelled him to act. Shelley would agree wholeheartedly with his action, as he defines a poet as both one who analyzes and creates a voice that “prolong[s] . . . a consciousness” for a cause and seeks to express the emotions caused by “surrounding objects” through “language” (802). He further elaborates that a poet’s “langua...

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...them fight. As legislators, poets create an order that should be sought after and fought for, whether it’s part of a collaborative effort to stop a war, or to begin one.

Works Cited

Benson, Heidi. "National Day of Poetry Against the War Today.” The San Francisco Chronicle 12 February 2003

Good, Regan. “Versus Verses.” The New York Times Magazine 23 February 2003

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” The Longman Anthology: British Literature: Volume 2A – The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 2003. 801-810.

---. “Sonnet: England in 1819.” The Longman Anthology: British Literature: Volume 2A – The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 2003. 761.