Anxiety rests on the idea of poetry, and to a lesser extent literature, and its nature as an art. Though the novel invited criticism and claims that its new form would allow literature to threaten the agency of the reader, poetry’s history, its claim as the original literary form and power within society, has invited a wealth of commentary regarding its value to the cultures it affects. Socrates criticizes the poet, claiming that he creators a false reality that is as removed from the original object it represents and that this removed state possesses little value for philosophers who must study truth. However, at the same time Socrates admits a love for the Homeric epic and for the form of poesy. Sidney sets out on a Defense of Poesy, which he confusingly also titles Apology for Poetry. This dichotomy invites the question of whether poetry should be defended or merely apologetically acknowledged. Regardless of its title, Sidney’s work lauds poetry not only above all other literary forms, but over all other modes of thought, though it criticizes the nature of English and English’s ability to work with poetry in the same way as Latin. Several centuries later Shelley brings forth the same problem under the same title, as his unapologetic Defense of Poetry claims English and Latin poets as not only superior to all other poets or professionals, but the modern representative of nearly every professional, through their aesthetic and their understanding of human sentiment. There is clearly a perceived need to account for poetry and defend it as a discipline.
The role of the critic within poetry needs to be addressed. Though many Defense of Poetry’s do not account for the experience of the reader as much as for either the role of the author or the poem itself, the critic is the last party engaging with the poem and is significant as he is also the defender of poetry. Furthermore, if poetry has an effect on society, it is through the reader it influences rather than through its creator. By not addressing the role of the critic, the poets imply that “critical power is of lower rank than the creative”, which, though “it is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that free creative activity is the highest function of man,” the legitimacy of this position is unclear (Arnold 500). Arnold argues it is “proved to be so by man’s finding in it his true happiness,” but this stance seems problematic, as the happiness of the individual author is fleeting, and though it is potentially a mode by which the quality of a work (or at least the production of a work) can be assessed, it must be of little lasting value. Indeed, Barthes argues it can be of almost no value whatsoever and only the experience of the reader is important as he operates as the “space in which are inscribed all the citations out of which a writing is made; the unity of a text is not in its origin but in its destination” (“The Death of the Author” 54). Without a final textual experience, the process of writing is unimportant. Arnold goes into the complexities of the role of the author, who he does not discount as readily as Barthes, but rather sees as tenuous and subject to a number of potential frailties. He argues, “the exercise of the creative power in the production of great works of literature or art, however high this exercise of it may rank, is not at all epochs and under all conditions possible; and that labor may be vainly spent in attempting it, which might with more fruit be used in preparing for it, in rendering it possible…Creative literary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas, that rather is the business of the philosopher. The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations- making beautiful works with them” (Arnold 500). It is clear that the critic is not the poet, but rather the effect of poetry; without a critic the poet’s innovation (for it is clear by Shelley’s eventual definitions that it is the poet who innovates, though Arnold has signified innovation as the philosopher’s field) would be lost and so language would lie forever stagnant.
Though Arnold seeks to explain that the critic is the true discoverer of the new in terms of form and content, he ultimately makes an argument against the author’s creative role in text. This essentially appeals to Socrates argument presented in Plato’s Republic, which decries poetry as imitative and unoriginal. Both Sidney and Shelley react against the perception that “all such things [as poetry] damage the minds of those who hear them, unless they have knowledge of what they are really like as an antidote” (Plato 40). Both react in a manner which is hyperbolic and which perhaps damages their argument, as they attribute to the poet much which is easily refuted. However, they raise interesting claims about the nature of poetry as well as the role and the reality of the poet.
Shelley’s history predicts many of the stances he will eventually take regarding the role of the individual poet within literature. Shelly attends Oxford but is eventually expelled for his radical ideas regarding atheism. Still a part of the educated elite in English society, he writes a number of treatises against established norms of education, religion, and politics, arguing for the rights and values of the individual. His well documented opinions regarding the nature of the politician, the citizen’s role within society, and the duty of the individual to others may account for his eventual claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as well as much the value he places on poets and their works. His radical emphasis on the responsibility of the individual coincides with the privilege he places on the author as a major factor in the meaning of poetry and its political function in society. Furthermore, the overriding thesis that poetry and the individual poets can influence and are responsible for influencing social change clearly coincides with his history of academic protest.
Throughout Percy Shelley’s Defense of Poetry there is a distinction made between “two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination” (1). Although this distinction initially appears to be aligned with Arnold and Socrates, who distinguish between the creative and the imitative modes of creation, it is clear that, unlike Arnold and Socrates, Shelley intends to privilege poetry as the creative mode of thought, and argue it results from the observations of the mental action which is merely reasonable. Reason is essentially defined as observation, as it “may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced, and [imagination], as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity” (Shelley 1). This initial definition of imagination attributes the creation of imaginary thought to an “author,” or the individual thinking and implies a self-contained quality that makes the imaginative thing, which is separate from the author since he is constrained within his own physical reality, whereas the product of imagination is definitely not physical. Thus the creation of the non-physical elements in the world is contingent on the presence of an author. This defends not only the creative identity of poetry as an element in the world separate from the real objects it connects, but more potently defends the author, who is responsible for adding this element to the world.
The creation and of poetry is complex, and cannot be attributed solely to the author of the work, but lies in some combination of the value of the work once it exists without the author combined with the author’s intent. Unlike Barthes, Shelley is not seeking to do away with the author. He elevates the poet before all other human beings, but at the same time seems to acknowledge some genesis of the poem outside the author himself within an imaginative realm that is more universal than any given author. He attributes imagination with “the principle of synthesis, and has for its own objects forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself” (Shelley 1). Imagination is a principle tied to an author; only the author can be responsible for the form or imagery of the poem. However, Shelley sees imagination as part of some “universal nature” that characterizes “existence itself,” an element of a reality for all people that does not rely on the presence of an author. Poetry transcends reason, which is “the enumeration of qualities already known” and is instead within the realm of “the perception of the value of [known] quantities, both separate and has a whole.” Reason is ultimately inferior to imagination, as it is “the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit as the shadow to the substance” (Shelley 1). The conclusion that reason is less significant than imagination as it is insubstantial is a tenuous assertion. The definition of reason given is that it sees and values forms where imagination values the essentially philosophical connections between forms, making imagination unlike the substance of objects. The conclusion and the legitimization of this paradox provides an access point to the extremity of the definition Shelley is attempting to provide, a definition that depends on the assumption that the world of the mind must be privileged above the physical reality. Imagination appeals to the substance of mental action. The significance of objects found in their connection to other objects ultimately determines those object’s worth and substance, but only within a context lacking physical substance to which reason first appeals. Shelley provides in this sentence the purely mental context of his argument for his reader. By establishing a paradigm of substance that is not wholly dependent on structures (physical or otherwise) Shelley is free to move forward through an argument of assertions which depend heavily on this contextual premise.
Having defined imagination, Shelley is free to go on to his subject of poetry, which he identifies as “the expression of imagination”. The introduction of a need for “expression” implies reliance on an author and, in all probability, an audience to receive this expression. This definition allows poetry to take on an identity as an expression of the ever-changing state of man’s perceptions and interpretations, a conceptualization of the form that both allows for a great breath of form and significance, but also creates an instability which puts both the author and the work in an unstable position. Time becomes an issue as, according to Barthes, it inherently must when the notion of the author is associated with literature. Time is potentially a product of the presence of the author. If the author is removed, time dissolves and allow the text to be conceptualized as pure and without a point of origin, existing perpetually contemporaneously with the reader. Any significance is created by the individual experiencing the effect of the text itself. Because the author “is always conceived as the past of his own book: book and author are voluntarily placed on one and the same line, distributed as a before and an after,” an inherent timeline is established by the existence of the authorial figure. When the author is removed, “there is no time other than the speech-act, and every text is written eternally here and now” (Barthes 49). However, this approach to time is problematic. The context of the author will always influence the substance of the text, and though the text may be derived purely from imagination, the origins of this imagination, the real images that the imagination functions to connect, will hold critical significance to the form that imaginative figures ultimately take. Representative and imitative arts, (though they are art and are composed of the “imagination,” a quality not available to the real context outside of art) will always reflect “the social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results” (Shelley 2). These elements create a “future contained within the present,” and any potential value of a text is found within the origins of the text itself, lying without manifestation but also attributable to the poetry and so the imagination of the poet.
The question of the author is tied to the ambiguity of the origins of poetry. The author has a hand in its creation, but difficulty lies in defining the limits of his role. If poetry is the result of the expression of imagination, authorship is easy to come by. However, poetry is not all expression. It is subject to “a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation” which, though not a mode of distinguishing poetry unilaterally, potentially provides a means of identifying works of high value and “from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other” (Shelley 2). Those for whom “the predominance of the faculty of the approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is…in excess are poets” (2). Significantly, poetry lies in observation and in the ability to differentiate beauty. Beauty is not merely the pleasure of the aesthetic (as Barthes seems to argue in his book Le Pleasure du Texte), but also a recognition of its cause. Imagination is the link between objects, as the cause of pleasure and pleasure itself, and in this link lays literary beauty. Objects themselves should contain an order of beauty, however poetry accesses a higher form of beauty which is the non-visual implied beauty of the language of poetry. This is consistent with the spoken (or at least written) nature of poetic expression, and in some ways appeals to Socrates’ concern that poetry is mere representation. Inhabiting an intangible realm, poetry enhances beauty by removing its physical and practical limitations. The poet not only sees the objects and the link, but can express the whole course of imagination, and perpetuate beauty, creating a new object for the focus of imagination.
Poetry plays a role in the evolution of language. Shelley argues that poetry not only uses language, but is an important aspect of the evolution of language. The connections poetry makes (which are the beautiful elements in language) establish linguistic norms marking “before unapprehended relationships of things and perpetuate[ing] their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs” (Shelley 3). In this way poetry allows for the establishment of language, legitimizing the resolution that poetry is necessary for society and for societal evolution, and endowing poets with a phenomenal power. Any connection made by a poet serves as a potential referent during the continued evolution of language. This makes the poet the father of all other positions of responsibility within society, and means, “if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse” (Shelley 3). With a stagnant language social evolution is necessarily limited. This pairing of poetry with a political consciousness is not unique to Shelley, but Shelley supports more than most a strong sense that the poet is the party responsible for advancement. If language moves forward, the society cannot help but be exposed to its beauty and thus be advanced. Likewise, if poetry ceased, a society could not move forward because it would lack the evolved vocabulary to address any new ideas and stagnation would be inevitable.
The office of the poet is unique and laden with responsibility. Poets are necessary so society will have the words to address its problems. Poets create meaning in language through authorship to address problems with which they are concerned, yet not all participants in language are poets. Some members of society are participating and using the rhetoric established by poets to more complex ends (and yet less significant foundationally) than the poets themselves. This invites further search for a identity for poetry and for the poet.
Poetry is concerned with language and with intangible observations about the universe. Poetic truths are established by the poet and exist once they are observed, but are not inherent in reality. Language is an appropriate tool for this entirely generative, creative mode of thought, and is able to function in a capacity that allows for the establishment of concrete, real truths and rules of existence. For this reason “in the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry…every language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem; the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry” (3). Poetry’s nearly infinite capacity for linguistic and imaginative creativity results in the creation of systems within language, like grammar and definitions. The establishments of such systems are moments of linguistic evolution. However, once a system is in place, it no longer is an element of the imaginative and creative field of poetry (though it is a product of poetry), but instead works within the less creative mode of simple reason, observation, and order. This is why poetry must be created perpetually. As soon as the connections of poetry have been made, they become tools for the rhetoricians, aiding society to express its current state but not contributing to its evolution. Shelley goes on to expound,
“poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of langue and of music, or of dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion…a poet essentially comprises and unites both those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of the latest time.” (Shelley 3)
A poet cannot predict future events and is not a prophet, but rather a poet “participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not” (Shelley 3). In essence, the poet’s ability to set the mood of the future or establish the tone of the past through description means he is able to establish history as it is created or reform it after it has been created as he sees fit. In this way Homer is able to establish his “Odyssey” as a common receptacle of all knowledge and heroics. The poet is able to bring protagonists to the front of action and attribute to them amazing feats, far beyond the limits of ordinary men. This new history, through it is the product of imagination rather than observation, has greater significance than the events as they occurred because the poetry captures the popular imagination and replaces the true history, which may never have been reported. Likewise, the characterization of the future created by a poet, the imagined future that can result only through poetic genesis, has far greater salience to the present than any unimagined future that does not exist at all. However, this seems to only address a poet’s ability to influence the direction in which society proceeds, and does not necessarily establish poets as law makers or legislators. While they may be the “directors of the arts of life” and even of the public perception of life, it also seems to be true that, beyond their substantial influence of language and thereby perception, they hold no real sway over the content of society.
Poetry is a discipline unto itself, as well as a mode by which culture can advance. Observing the “system of traditional forms and harmony of language” allows for the establishment of a typical system which “it is by no means essential that a poet accommodate,” but which to some extent he cannot avoid. Because poetry is an art of that creates and establishes language “every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification” (Shelley 3). Because of the innovative nature of poetry and the ever shifting structure of poetics “the distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error” (Shelley 4). This is clear, because if poetry leads to new meanings and forms in language then any linguistic evolution would fall under the purview of poetry. However, Shelley would further argue “the distinction between philosophers and poets has been anticipated” (4). Here issues of definition are highlighted. Poets are certainly concerned with the creation of connections between objects which are observably real. These connections are, according to Shelley, the products of the poet’s imagination. This makes them of higher value than real observable objects themselves. Philosophers should be concerned with truth. It is this assumption that leads Socrates to decry poets as debasers of truth, creating representations which are not truth themselves, yet Shelley would argue that “Plato was essentially a poet” (Shelley 4). By considering only the nature of Plato’s language, “the truth and splendor of his imagery, the melody of his” writing, it is relatively easy to classify him as an author (a creator of new truths by re-reporting existing realities with new connections) of an evolving style of language. He “rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style” (4). This is all consistent with the dedication to intangible truths and communication through language that must characterize a poet, yet Plato decries the poets as far less significant than philosophers. Truth, within a poetic world, is cyclical. All the authors “of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth” (4). This “echo of the eternal music” of truth and of social evolution means there can be no supreme poets “who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving ad teaching the truth of things, and than those who have omitted the form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton are all philosophers of the very loftiest power” (4). Because philosophers must employ language in order to give their philosophy the potency of expression, they are inevitably placed on the same level as the poets, bound by imagery for the expression of intangible ideas. The discrepancy for both Shelley and Plato, lies in the use of form and images. Plato and Socrates argue that description creates a removal from reality that is detrimental and removes poetry from philosophy. Shelley agrees with the creative power of poets, but argues it is here their power lies. Both Shelley and Plato describe events; Poets merely exercise more imagination in the form of this description but both Plato and Shelley seem to employ imaginative images. Neither description is the truth itself, and so both are poetry. The distinction, then, is the poetry with aesthetic value that will influence language, which ultimately seems to be what Plato has done, creating for himself an identity as a poet.
The role of the author as a god-like figure is important in literature and will always be a question if the author’s is role in the text is considered. Because the author plays both a creative and controlling role in the evolution of his work, it will always be difficult to separate Genesis from the creation involved in the production of other works of fiction. The role of the author initially seems to be most god-like in fictional narrative, because the author is creating lives, concerns, and worlds in which his action will play out. This ultimately is an important distinction which empowers the poet above other authors, as authors create worlds over which they have control, poets create truths which then exist in the uncontrolled “real” world. Where a fiction is an isolated story, “a poet is the image of life expressed in an eternal truth” (5). This is what makes an author’s power not that of G-d; the author creates a world that is unreal. The creative ability over the real that is possessed by the poet, though clearly limited to the creation of beauty and connection between real images, is still the power of creation over the real.
“There is this difference between a story and a poet, that is a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause, and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur [and which never in actuality occur]; the other is universal, ad contains within itself the germ of a relation to which motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augment that poetry, and forever develop new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful what which is distorted.” (5).
Poetry’s ability to create real truths through the narration of “living images” which impact the reality of the reader makes it perpetually salient, and allows it to assert a meaning that outstrips the limited application of the story. Even though the events narrated in poetry may be fictional, the linguistic evolutions demanded to classify writing as poetry means it will always have a dynamic and tangible effect whereas the effect of fiction is internalized, very real within the world of the fiction but specifically unreal for the reader and observers.
Ultimately it is not poetry but the poet that are defended. The creative prerogative of the poet exceeds any of his peers, placing him in a position to modify the past, present, and future more than any other social leaders. By modifying language the poet changes the tools available to other leaders, creating rhetoric that must be either used or modified by other poets. Language builds on itself and so poetry builds on the writing which preceded it. Though this is not necessary, it is the quality of an evolutionary task that it will reference its origins in order to modify and perpetuate forward momentum. Because of this an understanding of historic poetry is important, and the poet becomes a figure not only important currently and socially, but also genetically and culturally. Though they are not politicians, poets hold sway over reality that is potentially more potent than philosophers. A philosopher with a command of language, particularly an effective or revolutionary command, is a poet. A poet must be a philosopher as philosophy is concerned with truth, and poets are in the business of creating truth through writing, and so are concerned with making assertions over the same matter as philosophers. Shelley combines this with an apparent creative prowess (in terms of reality) over writers of pure and un-poetic fiction and gives poets superiority over all those who use language. Sidney has not defended poetry, but rather has defined it as a mode of creating real connections between observable things. He uses this definition to assert a number of defenses of poets as individuals, a project of empowerment consistent with the philosophies that guide his political and academic career.
