The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order, which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge;88 it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and the blossom of all other systems of thought: it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which if blighted denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were Virtue, Love, Patriotism, Friendship—what were the scenery of this beautiful Universe which we inhabit, what were our consolations on this side of the grave, and what were our aspirations beyond it, if Poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry’. The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results: but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest Poets of the present day, whether it be not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture89 of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by a limitedness of the poetical faculty itself. For Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for the Muse having ‘dictated’ to him ‘the unpremeditated song’.90 And let this be an answer to those who would alledge91 the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts: a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother’s womb, and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
Poetry is the record of the happiest and best moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own, but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last self appears as what it is, an atom to a Universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this etherial world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations92 of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them forth among mankind bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide—abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man…
Poetry turns all things to loveliness: it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed: it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.
All things exist as they are perceived;93 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’.94 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 familiarity95 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 re-iteration. It justifies that bold and true word of Tasso: Non merita nome di creatore se non Iddio ed il Poeta.96
A Poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let Time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor97 of human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest Poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath,98 and usurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge and executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony or form that certain motives of those who are ‘there sitting where we dare not soar’99 are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate.100 It is inconsistent with this d
ivision of our subject to cite living poets, but Posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins ‘were as scarlet, they are now white as snow’: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer Time.101 Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real and of fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets;102 consider how little is as it appears, or appears as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.103
Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the controul of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation when mental effects are experienced insusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind an habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a Poet becomes a man104 and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure both his own and that of others in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to105 calumny, when he neglects to observe the circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one another’s garments.
But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.
I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to my mind by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of following that of the treatise which excited me to make them public. Thus although devoid of the formality of a polemical reply, if the views which they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of the Four Ages of Poetry, so far at least as regards the first division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of the learned and intelligent author of that paper; I confess myself like him unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and Maevius106 undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable persons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound.
The first of these remarks has related to Poetry in its elements and principles; and it has been shewn, as well as the narrow limits assigned them would permit, that what is called Poetry in a restricted sense has a common source with all other forms of order and of beauty according to which the materials of human life are susceptible of being arranged, and which is Poetry in an universal sense.
The second part will have for its object an application of these principles to the present state of the cultivation of Poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and opinion, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the literature of England,107 an energetic developement of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free developement of the national will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. In spite of the low-thoughted108 envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual atchievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald, companion and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides, may often as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the Power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. 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.109 Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration,110 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.111
Appendix
The Contents of Shelley’s Volumes of Verse Published in His Lifetime
Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire by Shelley and his sister Elizabeth (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1810)
Letter (‘Here I sit with my paper, my pen and my ink’)
Letter: To Miss —– —– From Miss —— ——
Song (‘Cold, cold is the blast when December is howling’)
Song (‘Come —–! sweet is the hour’)
Song: Despair
Song: Sorrow
Song: Hope
Song: Translated from the Italian
Song: Translated from the German
The Irishman’s Song
Song (‘Fierce roars the midnight storm’)
Song: To —–—– (‘Ah! sweet is the moonbeam that sleeps on yon fountain’)
Song: To —–—– (‘Stern, stern is the voice of fates fearfull command’)
Saint Edmond’s Eve [The discovery that this poem was plagiarized from Matthew (‘Monk’) Lewis, Tales of Terror (1801), caused the volume to be withdrawn]
Revenge
Ghasta; or, The Avenging Demon!!!
Fragment, or The Triumph of Conscience
Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; Being Poems found amongst the Papers of that Noted Female who attempted the Life of the King in 1786, edited by John Fitzvictor (Oxford: J. Munday, 1810)
‘Ambition, power, and avarice, now have hurl’d’
Fragment. Supposed to be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé
Despair (‘And can’st thou mock mine agony, thus calm’)
Fragment (‘Yes! all is past—swift time has fled away’)
The Spectral Horseman
Melody to a Scene of Former Times
Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: With Notes (printed privately, 1813; first unauthorized edition: London: William Clark, 1821)
Dedication: To Harriet*****
Queen Mab
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy and Carpenter and Son, 1816)
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
O! there are spirits of the air
Stanzas.—April, 1814
Mutability
‘The pale, the cold, and the moony smile’
A Summer-Evening Church-Yard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire
To Wordsworth
Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte
Superstition
Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante
Translated from the Greek of Moschus
The Daemon of the World. A Fragment
Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century. In the Stanza of Spenser (London: Sherwood, Neely & Jones and C. and J. Ollier, 1817), withdrawn and reissued as The Revolt of Islam; A Poem, in Twelve Cantos (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818)
Dedication: To Mary —— —–
Laon and Cyntha
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[or]
Dedication: To Mary —— —–
The Revolt of Islam
Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; With Other Poems (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1819)
Rosalind and Helen
Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Sonnet. Ozymandias
The Cenci. A Tragedy, in Five Acts, [printed in] Italy (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1819)
The Cenci
Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1820)
Prometheus Unbound
The Sensitive-Plant
A Vision of the Sea
Ode to Heaven
An Exhortation
Ode to the West Wind
An Ode [Written, October, 1819, before the Spaniards had recovered their Liberty]
The Cloud
To a Sky-Lark
Ode to Liberty
Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant. A Tragedy. In Two Acts. Translated from the Original Doric (London: J. Johnston, 1820)
Oedipus Tyrannus
Epipsychidion: Verses Addressed to the Noble and Unfortunate Lady Emilia V—–, Now Imprisoned in the Convent of —– (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1821)
Epipsychidion
Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion Etc. (Pisa: ‘With the types of Didot’, 1821)
Adonais
Hellas: A Lyrical Drama (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1822)