Shelley begins his “A Defense of Poetry” by making a distinction between reason and imagination: “Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole” (109). Shelley likens reason to analysis and imagination to synthesis; reason examines the workings of particulars, and imagination–while keeping the particulars in mind–offers a more holistic view. Poetry, states Shelley, expresses the imagination and is entwined with the origins of humanity (109). Shelley exalts poetry as the bearer of humanity’s most profound truths; these truths speak of a universality, disregarding time and location, of order and beauty that legislates the world. Poetry keeps humanity human.

A Defense of Poetry illustrates the Zeitgeist of Shelley’s time. He saw the beginning of the nineteenth century as a time of rebirth from the tyrannies of the “grosser sciences” that continually seek to keep humans slaves, separated from imagination and its expression (134). Such tyrannies–the products of “reasoners” and “mechanics”–keep the imagination stifled and fettered in the shackles of rationalism and familiarity (131-4). When the rational faculties are emphasized over the creative faculties, then humanity loses sight of eternal truths and concentrates only on the acquisition of temporary pleasures and utilitarian fortunes. Yet, states Shelley, only when balanced with the imagination can science and its products be a boon to humanity, for the useful “strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to the sense” (132). Far from a technophobe, Shelley remained cautious about scientific advancements that overshadowed the creative spirit. A society based on the “selfish and calculating principle” could only produce external values which effaced the spirit in lieu of quantifiable materials and measurable wealth (135). Shelley’s dystopian vision, ostensibly not unlike our own society almost two-hundred years distant, could only be ameliorated by the work of the poet.

The poet eschews the monotonous, quotidian world through an ability to defamiliarize. Like distorting the sunlight and all it shines upon, the poet “makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos” (137). A verbal magician, the poet trans-forms the mundane into the fantastic through imagination. The poet stimulates the ob-server’s own creative impulses to produce new materials for knowledge, power, and pleas-ure; the poet’s creations inspire the mind to mold a reality and order based on the good and the beautiful (134-5). The good, then, has its genesis in the exploration of the creative im-pulse; i.e., an emancipation from the prison of stifling familiarity can only lead to the good.

Indeed, the implications of that last statement exemplify Shelley’s vision of the poet and explain the Romantics’ propensity to venerate Milton’s Satan above his God. Shelley suggests that because he perseveres despite adversity and continues even though his efforts will only lead to more suffering, Milton’s Satan “as a moral being is far superior to [Milton's] God” (129). Satan challenges God’s dominance and authority; God casts Lucifer and his followers out of paradise, but Satan still attempts to thwart his nemesis by influencing His creation. Satan, therefore, introduces imagination into the world by convincing Eve to ask questions about God’s law, asserting her own creativity and self-reliance. Satan, then, illustrates Shelley’s goodness and beauty by stimulating the imagination in his hearer: Eve. Through Satan’s ministrations, humans were able to make their own choices and assert their own creativity and individuality on their world.

Shelley’s poet introduces difference into the world in en effort to promote unity. Poetry is divine in that it provides the seed for all of humanity’s creations: religions, institutions, politics, philosophy, and technology. Difference produces dialectic; anthesis (going back to Hegel) produces synthesis. The imagination exists within this synthesis, helping to make the products universally important. The pleasure poetry produces in its observers stimulates the imagination, leading to more expressions of eternal beauty and goodness. Each synthesis is an innovation–a revolution–a new way of knowing the world and perceiving the truth (114-5). Shelley suggests that “A poem is the image of life expressed in its eternal truth” (115). The poet’s expression demonstrates this eternal truth better than the didactic versifier or pedantic priest; the poetry itself influences the moral health of humanity (117-8).

While Shelley’s philosophy of the poet may be a positive, liberating belief in an intellectual capacity, the political implications would probably result in a French Revolution every twenty years or so. Rather than interpreting Shelley’s Defense as a pragmatic manual for life, it should be considered as an intellectual manifesto. Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses asks “What kind of idea am I?” suggesting a twentieth-century interpretation of Shelley’s heresies. They are both suggesting the same thing, are they not? Rushdie calls for freedom from the thoughtless acceptance of religious faith and a trust of one’s own voice and how it responds to and with humanity’s polyphony. Shelley seeks similar ends. He repudiates Descartes’ ascetic vision of the “little world of self” and seeks to reconcile the poet’s place within society (128). Also like Rushsie, Shelley heretically states that while Jesus’ vision contained the “most vivid poetry,” his followers, seeking to codify and dogmatize, quickly distorted and effaced his poetic principle in an effort to create a practical institu-tion (125-6). How does one institutionalize a revolution anyway?

Shelley, recalling Vico, suggests that the poets were the first harmonizers–the first creators of society:

Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion and political conditions of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it: developing itself in correspondence with their development. (130)

The poet produces and is produced by his society. The great poets synthesize their present age and point to the future ages. Their expressions are representative of their age and also of all time. These poets keep the poetic principle alive within their listeners, instructing through their/our imagination. They legislate humanity by keeping it human.

Goethe’s Faust is a complex work of literature that is concerned with the place of humanity in the cosmos, the striving of its protagonist beyond his human confines, the implications of his going too far, and the consequences that his quest have on his community.

Goethe wrote Faust in two parts (Part I in 1808, Part II in 1832), and together they revise the Faustus legend to fit with Romantic sensibilities and eighteenth-century attitudes toward earthly life and the beyond. The theme of a man selling his soul to the devil for earthly desires—fame, knowledge, wealth, power—developed from a profound Christian belief in life after death. Goethe updates the legend by adding a prolonged love story, making his devil an ironic and mocking figure, and allowing Faust’s soul to escape damnation.

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The principal object, then, proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men. … Humble and rustic life was generally chosen because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity … and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. …

What is a poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a  man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. …

Aristotle, I have been told, has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so; its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony. … The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude; the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.

–William Wordsworth

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No simple label can describe the Romantic Age, for if anything the artists of this era were individualists. Some were disillusioned by the empty promises of the French Revolution; most were disgusted with the mechanistic society they saw around them in their cities. They seemed to feel that the men before them had been too analytic, too dogmatic, too shackled to rules set up by formidable academies. Now it was time for self-expression, for a new emergence of the individual and his feelings. The following sources point to some of the directions this concern with self took.

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August 30

Unhappy man! Aren’t you a fool? Aren’t you deceiving yourself? What sense is there in this raging endless passion? I no longer have prayers except to her; no other form appears to my imagination except hers, and I see everything in the world about me only in relation to her. And this brings me many a happy hour — until I must tear myself away from her again. Oh Wilhelm! The things my heart often urges me to do! — When I have been sitting with her for two or three hours and have feasted on her figure, her manner, the divine expression of her thoughts, and then gradually my senses become tense, a darkness appears before my eyes, I can scarcely hear anything, my throat is constricted as though by the hand of an assassin, and my heart beats wildly trying to relieve my oppressed senses, but only increasing their confusion–Wilhelm, often I don’t know whether I really exist. And at times — when melancholy does not get the upper hand and Lotte permits me the wretched comfort of shedding my tears of anguish on her hand — I must leave her, I must get outside and roam far through the fields; I then find my pleasure in climbing a steep mountain, cutting a path through an untrodden forest, through hedges which tear me, through thorns which rend me. Then I feel a little better. A little . . . Oh, Wilhelm! The solitary dwelling of a cell, the hair shirt, and belt of thorns are the comforts for which my soul yearns. Goodbye; I see no end to this misery but the grave.

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Nevertheless, I set forth all alone and tall of, spirit on the stormy ocean of the world, though I knew neither its safe ports nor its perilous reefs. First I visited peoples who exist no more. I went and sat among the ruins of Rome and Greece, those countries of virile and brilliant memory, where palaces are buried in the dust and royal mausoleums hidden beneath the brambles . . . I meditated on these monuments at every hour and through all the incidents of the day. Sometimes, I watched the same sun which had shone down on the foundation of these cities now setting majestically over their ruins; soon afterwards, the moon rose between crumbling funeral urns into a cloud-less sky, bathing the tombs in pallid light. Often in the faint, dream-wafting rays of that planet, I thought I saw the Spirit of Memory sitting pensive by my side . . . On the mountain peaks of Caledonia, the last bard ever heard in those wildernesses sang me songs which had once consoled a hero in his old age. We were sitting on four stones overgrown with moss; at our feet ran a brook, and in the distance the roebuck strayed among the ruins of a tower, while from the seas the wind whistled in over the waste land of Cona . . . And yet with all my effort what had I learned until then? I had discovered nothing stable among the ancients and nothing beautiful among the moderns. The past and present are imperfect statues — one, quite disfigured, drawn from the ruins of the ages and the other still devoid of its future perfection.

From François-René de Chateaubriand. René, The Continental Edition of World Masterpieces, Edited by Maynard Mack, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1966.

Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches, and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. . . . Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its preestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery. . . . Instruction, that mysterious communing of Wisdom with Ignorance, is no longer an indefinable tentative process, requiring a study of individual aptitudes, and a perpetual variation of means and methods, to attain the same end; but a secure, universal, straightforward business, to be conducted in the gross, by proper mechanism, with such intellect as comes to hand. . . . In defect of Raphaels, and Angelos, and Mozarts, we have Royal Academies of Painting, Sculpture, Music. . . . These things . . . indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavor, and in natural force, of any kind.

–Thomas Carlyle

The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples, in favor of depressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek Literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.

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I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all truth of nature, and that man is myself.

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Plato, in his Symposium, suggests that one could ascend the latter of love to glimpse truth in the beauty of the Forms; through love one could know beauty/truth. He also states in book ten of his Republic that: “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.” Plato believes that imitation of sensible objects removed the poet, and the observer, from truth and reality by inspiring the emotions of pity and fear. Plato argued that philosophical knowledge is far superior that the mere imitative nature of art. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, seems to also climb the ladder of love literally, metaphorically, and contextually to achieve the supreme artistic expression, Platonically speaking.

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