A Defence of Poetry

"The mind in creation is as a fading coal." Shelley sets that image near the heart of this essay, and it tells you exactly how he believed poems arrive: not built but breathed into brightness by some invisible, inconstant wind, already dimming by the time the pen can move. He wrote the Defence to answer his friend Thomas Love Peacock, who had teased that the poet was a semi-barbarian in an age of scientists and political economists. What came back was not a polite rebuttal but a torrent of conviction, a young poet arguing that imagination is the root of every moral act, because to be greatly good a person must put themselves in the place of another, and only imagination can carry them there. Poetry, he writes, lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world. He drowned the next year, and never saw these pages in print. They close on a sentence of glorious defiance for an art so often dismissed as ornament: poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.