Shelley A Defense of Poetry

In A Defense of Poetry, Shelley’s main concern of his essay is to stress the beneficial impacts poetry has on the human mind. To do this he feels it is necessary to define the nature of poetry. Thus, Shelley he must first address the nature of the poet, which leads to, addressing the nature of man. He argues that the creation of language reveals a human desire to reproduce the rhythmic and ordered. This is then, is expressed in the form of speech. Shelley also, however, realizes that language is not exactly poetry at its finest state of art. Yet, he claims that it hold a various degree of art to an extent. He claims this because language holds many qualities of poetry: rhythm, patterns, order, harmony, unity, ect. In analyzing the nature of poet and man, Shelley concludes the duty of a true poet is to communicate art and certain feelings, beauty, or experiences to their audience in the most clear and vivid way possible. They should be able to accomplish this simply because of their high sensitivity or capability to depict true beauty and art from situations in ways the common person cannot. “Faculty of approximation” allows the viewer to experience the beautiful, by forming a “relation between the highest pleasure and its causes”. Those who possess this trait “in excess” as opposed to the common spectator are poets, and their task is to communicate the pleasure of their experiences to the community

            According to Shelley, poets are not only the authors of language, dance, music, or just about every form of art. They are rather, the institutors of law and social order. He says "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” With these strong opinionated statements, my question to Shelley would be: is a poet superior to the average, non-artistic man? From what I seem to understand of Shelley’s writing, he believes these poets are superior to other men because they are more capable of accurately observing experience and order in its highest form of pleasure. In my opinion this is like a “sixth sense” that Shelley is trying to describe. And it is because of the poets extra sensibility to knowledge of art, and experience, that they are able to be the unsung legislators of law, and rulers of society.