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.