A Defence of Poetry

In "A Defence of Poetry" Percy Bysshe Shelley is (1) defining poetry and (2) creating a defending apologetics of sorts for the poets and poetics of the Romantic Age. The poets of the Romantic Age...

Shelley, like Philip Sidney 240 years earlier, produced a long essay enumerating those qualities that make poetry a superior form of writing and the most worthwhile of intellectual pursuits. The...

At the end of his "Defence of Poetry," Shelley states the following. A few of the words may be difficult, so we will need to unpack this to understand what the last line means: Poets are the...

"A Defence of Poetry" is an essay written by English dramatist and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although he wrote the essay in 1821, it was published posthumously in 1840 as a part of a collection...

The main idea of A Defence of Poetry is really a simple one. The majority of Shelley's essay lays out arguments in support of the main idea. Shelley asserts that poetry is the herald of beneficial...

The duality of the poetic faculty according to Shelley is that the poet is not only an aesthete and creator of beautiful art in words, but that the poetry has moved history forward, and has changed...

Shelley's primary defense of poetry is that it is an impulse native to the "infancy of society." In other words, poetry, as the expression of beauty and truth apprehended, or perceived, by the...

In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry,” the author discusses the different aspects of the literary genre that make it so impactful. One of these is poetry’s ability to create change....

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet in the English Romantic tradition, wrote "A Defence of Poetry" in 1821, although it was not published until 1841, after he had died. Alexander Pope's An Essay in...

While Plato suggests that poets are irrational and ignorant, Shelley considers poets to be speakers of universal truth and conveyors of the motives of human nature. The large topic of how Shelly...

Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay A Defence of Poetry has as it's main tenet the assertion, summed up in the concluding paragraphs, that poets are the force that drives society to higher and better...

Poetry, like any art form, can change the way people think and feel. It does this not by presenting an argument but by creating a strong emotion within the reader. In the terminology of classical...

In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry,” tradition seems to be viewed as an important precedent or example. It serves as a guide that helps Shelley think about the present. For...

In A Defence of Poetry Shelley makes a couple of statements that might engender debate. The first is that the Romantic poets, the poets of his present "memorable" age, were the best to come along...

Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" is exactly that—a defense of the value of poetry to society. It was written in rebuttal to his friend Thomas Love Peacock's essay "The Four Ages of Poetry," a magazine...

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