Shelley's A Defense of Poetry

Embarrassment comes in many forms, much to the delight of the rest of us. Today I admit to a rather boring and nerdy embarrassment: I profess to be a writer, perhaps even a poet, and I have never read anything by John Milton (I’m not even sure that John is his first name (off the top of my head)); and not only do I consider myself a writer, I am actually in all truth in possession of a BA and an MA in English literature, and I still have never read anything by Milton. This is not entirely my fault: I tried to take a class on Milton my first semester of graduate school, but the class was full, and I ended up taking a much better class in its place; but it is partially my fault, as I was supposed to read Paradise Lost, at least parts of it, as an undergrad, and I didn’t. It probably seemed too long. I was also supposed to read “Lycidas”, but I really just skimmed it.

This only comes up because we are approaching Milton’s 400th birthday; because there is a new edition of Paradise Lost out, a facing-page “translation” of the poem into a more modern English prose, by Dennis Danielson; and because I was reading Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, in which he can’t stop talking about Milton. So: to celebrate my knowledge of Milton, I throw my hat in the ring with a few quotes from Shelley that have nothing to do with him; and I vow to read Paradise Lost in the coming months (in verse, mind you), and perhaps “Lycidas”.

All quotes are from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, printed selectively in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. You can see the full text at http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html.

“Although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order.”

“[ The poet ] not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”

“The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

“The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.”

“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.”

“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.”

Even though Shelley is wrong when he says, “all spirits on which [ poetry ] falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight,” perhaps it wouldn’t hurt these days to read a little Milton, or Shelley, or Zaremberg (pending publication – no, no: pending submission; first up, a translation of Shelley into reasonable English).