Poetry and thinking in Percy Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry”

One year before his tragically premature death in 1822, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote an essay called A Defence of Poetry, that was only to be published posthumously, in 1840, in order to present his own take on the subject. In the essay he deals with questions that range from the metaphysical to matters of metre, he discusses the human relationship with the world and existence, thinking and the production of poetry, what counts as poetry and the role it plays in people’s lives.

A “widespread dissatisfaction” with the way the act of thinking has been portrayed in Western philosophy since the 17th century  – reduced to reason; meaning rationality – has been identified in representatives of various styles of modern thought.^[1] In his Defence Shelley develops his theories concerning thought, poetry and their relationship, such as the analogy between the objective and subjective realms and the way in which poetry mediates this connection.

Shelley traces a fascinating parallel between the way wind harps produce sound and poets write poems, both being the result of the interaction between different entities, the harp/poet and the wind/reality, i.e. the translation one makes of the other in the very act of that interaction.

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The Defence starts out proposing a dichotomy of “two classes of mental action”, which are: reason and imagination. Reason is the type of mental action that deals with the relation between thoughts and what differentiates them, its objects are “common to universal nature and existence itself”^[2]. In other words, for Shelley Reason is preoccupied with the relations between what we think and all that actually exists in the horizon of our experience; it is the principle of synthesis. Imagination – whose expression Shelley calls poetry (in a wide sense) – deals with thoughts as “the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results”^[3], it is the principle of analysis. The imagination imparts to thoughts some of its own quality, and composes from them, other thoughts.

He affirms that “reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, the body to the spirit, the shadow to the substance”^[4]. Note that in these comparisons the first term of each pair (reason, instrument, body, shadow) possesses its own specific properties but is constrained in its effect by the second term (imagination, agent, spirit, substance). Reason contemplates the relations between thoughts (or concepts) but imagination provides it with them.

Shelley claims that humans are somewhat similar to Aeolian lyres (wind harps) – “Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven”^[5]; he is the passive percipient of this current of impressions. The instrument, very popular in Britain during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, consists of an oblong wooden box with strings running lengthwise across the top, stretched over bridges at each end and attached to tuning pegs.^[6] Placed on a windowsill, the harp vibrates to the pulsation of air currents producing sound. For Shelley, humans are similarly subject to the influence of external (sense perception) and internal (feelings, emotions) stimuli resonating accordingly. The language he employs often blurs the lines of his analogy but, at the same time, hints at the recondite conjunction between sensation, thinking and the production of poetry.

The analogy – between humans and Aeolian harps – was influenced by materialist philosophers of sensation and identity such as David Hartley, whose work Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749) had dedicated advocates in Britain, and proposed the correlation between physiological and psychical facts.^[7] But Shelley goes further in affirming that – differently from the wooden instrument – humans “and perhaps all sentient beings” are endowed with a principle of internal adjustment between the sounds excited and the impressions that excite them; we are capable of producing not only melody (passively) but harmony (actively) as well. This can be read under the light of the Kantian idea, as expressed by Stanley Cavell, “that knowledge is active, and sensuous intuition alone passive or receptive”^[8], impressions happen to a person like the wind licks the strings of the Aeolian lyre, and in a subsequent stage the person acts upon the stimuli using their harmonizing principle. This special harmonizing principle, which reveals new thoughts to those more finely attuned – “new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure”^[9] – as well as previously unapprehended relations between old ones, allows them to perceive the good that Shelley asserts to be inherent to the relations between existence and perception. Shelley locates the imagination between perception and expression, also referring to it as the “creative faculty”^[10] , “faculty of approximation to the beautiful”^[11] or the “poetical faculty”^[12].

The way Shelley continuously refers to an eternal realm – home of  beauty, truth and the good – sounds strangely platonic, in a time when Plato was “still regarded in schools and universities as a subversive and corrupting author”^[13]. Though Shelley studied many philosophers, Plato influenced him greatly. Shelley not only incorporated aspects of his philosophy, but he reworked Plato’s metaphysical ideas through his poetry to create his own unique metaphysical view.

Under yet another influence – that of the early Coleridge – Shelley is willing to go beyond anthropocentrism and develop a philosophy that includes the nonhuman when he extends his claim to include all sentient beings.^[14] Hartley´s theory of vibrations accords with the sentience Shelley proposes: being sentient is vibrating in tune (or out of tune), under the influence of some other entity.  One is more or less attuned according to one´s propinquity to the (platonic, ideal) realm of what Shelley sometimes calls the beautiful (but also: the good and the truth); and this approximation consists in the observation of similarities between relations in the order of the natural things of the world and those in the order of thoughts. From this platform Shelley is able to imagine thinking as analogous to a physical process: a vibration or an interference pattern between vibrations. For him sensation and thinking are ontologically similar.^[15] The harp produces sound because the wind blows over it making its strings vibrate; the mind thinks because sensations/impressions go through it, making it produce thoughts (the mind’s own vibrations). This parallel has its implications, one of them being the opening up of a vast subjective inner-space – a copy of the objective universe that is subject to the re-workings of the imaginative faculty – the conceptual vocabulary one must have in order to interpret reality and existence (or express it).

Shelley goes on to give a narrower definition of poetry: it is essentially arrangements of language, especially metrical language, which are created by imagination. And poetry is the best possible medium for the expression of imagination because its raw-material – language – is “arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone”^[16], it is a “more direct representation of the actions and passions of our being”^[17], while other materials, instruments and conditions of art add a step (the translation from the language of the concept to the language of the material) between conception and expression. This idea is in line with what Susan Stewart says when she affirms that poetry is taken to be the “speculative art least bound to materiality, and most productive of symbols”.^[18] For Shelley there is a double process of translation going on in the mind of the painter, for example, first from sensations into thoughts – the building of his repertoire of concepts – and later the movement from thinking into the shapes and colours that will compose his work, whereas the poet must perform only the first of these conversions, from sensations into concepts, and these will be directly expressed in arrangements of language, i.e. poems.

When left outside by itself the Aeolian harp will now and then emit its eerie vibrations, caused by the friction of the air currents against it. Martin Heidegger asserts that we can never hear the wind in itself, there isn’t such a thing as the sound of the wind.^[19] What we hear is the wind whistling in the chimney, the wind rustling the leaves of a tree, the wind on the strings of an Aeolian harp. We hear the wind´s translation of the strings; the hollow sound box´s translation of the string´s vibration into amplified pressure waves. Entering our inner ear, these waves are translated by a pressure cell. This cell acts as a transducer, translating mechanical vibrations into electrochemical signals.^[20] Therefore, a  series of conversions must take place in order for us to process perception (αἴσθησις – aisthēsis). Shelley describes the activity of the poet in similar terms. The poet, exposed to (external and internal) impressions will translate their influence into thoughts and language. There is for him, as well as for Heidegger, a step, or a difference, between these impressions and the words used to talk about them. They are not one in the other, they are different things that we correspond. It is possible to contrast this idea with what Stewart argues when she talks about poems being “capable of expressing embodied consciousness” and “made of our own natures”^[21]. For Stewart there doesn’t seem to be a separation, language embodies, its form literally is what it wants to convey. Whereas for Shelley the poem is a translation, it is the transformation the poet operates upon impressions through his refined and sensitive imagination; the poet creates an object (a poem) that will have an effect over those who read it, it will point out to the very structure of their subjectivity producing a frame of mind that will allow them to have a glimpse of the “eternal truth” of life and things – to which only poets have any access. ^[22]

It is important to highlight the way in which, for Shelley, the poet’s imagination is responsible for this translation, which is the creation of representations that correspond to the influence of certain impressions – the poet’s imagination is responsible for poetry and poetry is essencial for humans to make sense of the world. For him, in order to render this conversion poets make vital use of metaphorical language, because it “marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension”^[23]. Interestingly, the Greek word for translation is metaphor .^[24]

In his attempt to trace back the origins of poetry Shelley talks about the youth of the world and the origins of language. According to him during the infancy of society all language was poetry (in the wide sense of the expression of the imagination) and every author was a poet, because at that point the very first translations (from the realm of sensations and that of feelings and emotions) were being made – the first metaphors were being created – and most relations were still unapprehended. Humans would observe and imitate nature, getting more or less intense pleasure out of these mimetic representations according to their degree of approximation to the natural order, or rhythm, of things. Shelley quotes Francis Bacon who affirmed that there are similarities between the order of nature and the order of subjectivity: “[These similitudes or relations are] the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world.” ^[25] What Shelley believes is that the architecture of man´s subjectivity is analogous to that of nature itself, the one being a kind of copy of the other, its conversion from objective, material, into subjective and subtle.

He points out this parallel in the relations within the order of sounds (sensations) and those in the order of thoughts (thinking), that justify the patterns of sound (e.g. rhythm, rhyme) present in poetry, and he emphasises its role (when compared to the meaning of the words themselves) towards the communication of the poem’s influence.  Even though for Shelley metre is just part of a system of traditional forms – and is not essential to poetry in the wider sense – when it comes to poetry in his narrower sense he says that “every great poet must inevitably innovate (…) in the exact structure of his peculiar versification”^[26].

The distinction between poets and prose writers is for Shelley erroneous because he acknowledges two modes of harmony that are expressed in poetry (in the wider and narrower senses respectively): harmony of thought and harmony of form. Therefore, poetry is for him any type of text that will reveal the underlying beauty and truth of things. He includes in the hall of great poets Plato, Francis Bacon and all the “authors of revolutions”^[27].

Shelley also says that eventually words become signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts, and because of that we constantly need new poets to arise and renew language, or, as he puts it: “to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized”^[28], otherwise language is at risk of becoming useless to the “nobler purposes of human intercourse”, people may become desensitized to language through a process not dissimilar to that which Giambattista Vico describes in his New Science^[29]: civilized people become unable to imagine the great animated reality that was the result of the early analogies established between human subjectivity and natural phenomena.

As mentioned before, for Shelley poetry has the fundamental role of reproducing the universe (“of which we are portions and percipients”), in the sense that one must recreate it – translate the universe into a language one’s own mind is able to process – in order to “feel that which we perceive and to imagine that which we know”^[30]. Poetry (in the wide sense previously defined) is, therefore, responsible for opening up this inner-space, “it creates for us a being within our being”, it unlocks subjectivity and translates the universe into thoughts that will be dealt with further by reason and imagination. In that sense Shelley echoes the words of Tasso and says: “No one merits the name of creator except God and the Poet”^[31].

Shelley´s assertion “All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient”^[32] shows his ideas were swimming in the waters of the 18th century philosophies, and expresses once again the step one’s mind takes in the translation (or conversion) of reality into thinking. The experience of reality is dependent on this act. And not everyone is able to perform this act of translation with the same accuracy; the poet seems incomparably better equipped to do so, for he “participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one”^[33]. For Shelley the poet possesses a more developed faculty of imagination than any other man, and his social significance lies in the way his fine understanding of reality gets expressed and perpetuated within a community. It is not surprising that Shelley puts poets right at the top of a hierarchy of sensibility, in a moment when thinkers and philosophers had started to think about the concept of genius as a quality of the individual artist instead of something in the work produced.

What is being affirmed is the dependence of the mode of perception on the percipient; there is no direct access into reality. It all gets translated into our minds and must be organized in language in order to be communicated.

Poetry does not participate in specific contexts of time and space, and the poet should not try to embody in his work the conditions of his age or region. Again in contrast with Stewart´s essay, in which she places within the realm of the poem information about its “somatic, emotional, and social conditions beyond whatever meanings their language conveys”^[34], for Shelley, if poetry points toward something beyond its words that is not the context of its creation, it, rather, points toward “the life of truth”^[35], “echoing the eternal music”^[36], granting humans some access to the ultimate knowledge of things.

“Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.”^[37]

Poetry is placed at the very top of the agenda of his metaphysical investigation. Timothy Morton points out that in the last sentence Shelley shifts from metaphor to reality: “[Poetry] is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it”. Here, he is talking about thinking, but he’s also talking about roses, once more approximating and tracing the parallel between internal/external impressions and thinking.

Not even time is objective for Shelley. Despite his inability to predict the form of the future, the poet “foreknows the spirit of events”^[38]. He draws from his proximity to the (eternal) order of truth and beauty, material to compose his poems, and a poem is an inexhaustible source of new thoughts and relations. Shelley says that time only serves to increase the possibilities of a poem, in opposition to its effect over – non-poetical – stories, which will lose their meaning or significance as time passes.

“All high poetry is infinite (…) a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence, which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds”^[39]. Therefore a poem can never have a final, definite, interpretation – its meaning lies always ahead, in the future. The famous quote by the French poet Paul Valéry, in which he says that a poem is never finished, it is merely abandoned, is imbued of the same spirit as that of Shelley´s assertions. For Shelley, the judgment upon the work of a poet “belongs, as he does, to all time”^[40].

The idea that time flows in one direction and consists of a sequence of now-points is – according to Shelley´s theory – a certain version of time produced by a certain way of looking  at reality; and poets “are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present”^[41]. The role of the poet’s imagination is to constantly rework old translations, and come up with new ones that will – in the future – allow (once more) for reinterpretations.

Another example of the idea that the meaning perhaps lies in the future is expressed by Nietzsche in the preface of his Antichrist, whence one reads the warning saying that book was written for humans that probably aren’t yet alive, and that its meaning will only be realised in the future.^[42]

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Thinking, in Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, consists on man´s (creative) conceptualization of reality and on the way he organizes those concepts. This process can be explained in the terms of a translation the mind performs, converting external and internal impressions (sensorial input, emotions, feelings) into thoughts – or concepts – that will function as a mental reproduction of the universe of our experience.  Imagination allows one to produce these thoughts, that are compared and contrasted by reason.

Shelley proposes that poets are specially suited for this job because they stand in peculiar proximity to the ideal realm of truth and beauty (unchanging and beyond the experiential material world), and the reason for that is that poets have a special attunement to the world that allows them to produce good translations of reality which will stand the test of Time by constant reinterpretation.

As an Aeolian harp produces sounds through its interaction with the wind, man thinks through his interaction with – and translation of – material reality; Shelley identifies an analogy between physical processes (such as the sound of the harp) and thinking.

Consequently the poet has an absolute role – he is “the unacknowledged legislator of the world”^[43] – in the mediation between reality and the mind, for he is the holder of the key (poetry) to this inner-universe, be means of which one perceives reality and that determines how one understands and interacts with it.

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^[1] Cavell, S. Aversive Thinking: Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche pp.132-33  In: New Literary History, Vol.22, 1991/Winter pp.129-160

^[2] Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis 1904 p.12 All quotations from Shelley are from this edition

^[3] Ibid.,p.12

^[4] Ibid.,p.12

^[11] Ibid.,p.17

^[12] Ibid.,p.35

^[13] Holmes, R. Shelley: The Pursuit,  New York: E.P. Dutton and Co, 1975 p.26

^[14] Morton, T. An Object-Oriented Defence of Poetry p.205 In: New Literary History, Vol.43 2012/Spring pp.205-224

^[15]  Ibid, p.205

^[16] Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry p.22

^[17] Ibid.,p.21

^[18] Stewart, S. What Praise Poems are for p.236 In: PMLA, Volume 120, Number 1, January 2005, pp.235-245

^[19] Heidegger,M. The Origin of the Work of Art p.10  translated by Roger Berkowitz and Philippe Nonet, 2006 available at http://www.academia.edu/2083177 /The_Origin_of_the_Work_of_Art_by_Martin_Heidegger      
  (accessed on 25/07/2013)

^[20] Morton, T. An Object-Oriented Defence of Poetry pp.206

^[21] Stewart, S. What Praise Poems are for p.235 In: PMLA, Volume 120, Number 1, January 2005, pp. 235-245

^[22] Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry p.27

^[23] ibid. p.17

^[24] Morton, T. An Object-Oriented Defence of Poetry pp.206

^[25] Bacon, F. De Augmentis Scientiarum, cap.1, lib.III In: Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry p.18

^[26] Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry p.25

^[27] Ibid p.26

^[28] Ibid p.18

^[29] Vico, G. The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1725) book II, 378 available at: http://archive.org/details /newscienceofgiam030174mbp (accessed on 25/07/2013) 
“But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.” “

 ^[30] Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry p.83

^[31] Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry p.83

^[32] Ibid, p.82

^[33] Ibid, p.20

^[34] Stewart, S. What Praise Poems are for p.235

^[35] Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry p.26

^[36] Ibid. p.27

^[37] Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry pp.76-77

^[38] Ibid., p.20 (my stress)

^[39] Ibidp. 67

^[40] Ibid. p.30

^[41]Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry p.90

^[42] Nietzsche, F. The Antichrist,  translation Mencken, H.L. The Project Gutenberg, 2006, p.37 available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm

^[43] Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry p.90

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