Percy Bysshe Shelley Study Questions

E491: History of Literary Criticism

Al Drake | 520 Hum. M/W 12:00-1:00 | ajdrake@ajdrake.com

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

1. To what extent, according to Shelley, are poets aware of their significance to the human community? Who may judge a poet, and what time frame does Shelley assert for the making of such judgments? (699)

2. Why is it, according to Shelley, that "Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth..."? (700)

3. What does Shelley identify as "the great secret of morals"? How is this secret connected to imagination and poetry? (700)

4. Why is Shakespeare's King Lear, in Shelley's view, the "most perfect specimen of the dramatic art"? (702)

5. What benefit does Shelley attribute to Athenian drama for those who beheld it? How were ancient Greek tragedies like "mirrors" and even "prismatic and many-sided mirror[s]?" (703)

6. What happens to drama, according to Shelley, when "the decay of social life" sets in? (703)

7. How does Shelley illustrate by way of the "bucolic writers" of late antiquity the regenerative power remaining to poetry even in a corrupt age? (704-05)

8. In examining the Romans' appropriation of Greek art, how does Shelley broaden his definition of poetry? (706)

9. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, what kept the world from "utter anarchy and darkness"? (706) How, in the Eleventh Century, did the Christian and Chivalric systems lead to improvements in the lives of Europeans? (706-08)

10. How did Dante and Milton, respectively, unintentionally help to lead their cultures beyond the current forms of life and thought? How did they set down in permanent form what, according to Shelley, was most worthy in their eras to be preserved? (708-09)

11. In praising Milton, what critique of Paradise Lost's theology does Shelley adduce? Why does he think that Milton's Satan is "superior" to his God? If you have read Paradise Lost, do you agree with Shelley's claims, or do you think he is engaging in what Harold Bloom would call "strong misreading"--i.e. in a kind of misreading that makes for excellent art or criticism of a new kind? (708-09)

12. How does Shelley refute those (like his friend Thomas Peacock) who say that poetry should give way before the demands of modern "Utility"? How does Shelley himself define this term so that poetry emerges as the most "useful" of all human activities? (710-711)

13. Why, according to Shelley, is it that "man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave" and that "we want [lack] the creative faculty to imagine that which we know"? That is, what has happened to the human spirit or imagination with the advent of science, technology, and industry? (712)

14. What does Shelley identify as the two "functions of the poetical faculty"? What is poetry's true relation to science? (713)

15. How, according to Shelley, does inspiration come to the poet, and how does it operate? Consider his metaphors: "fading coal," "the colour of a flower...," and, on 714, "a wind over a sea." Optional: in what sense does Shelley's treatment of inspiration differ from that of Plato in Ion? (713-14)

16. How might Shelley's metaphoric treatment of inspiration affect his assertions about poets' ability to express the feelings and thoughts with which their minds have been inspired? Moreover, does his theory of inspiration conflict with the claims he makes about poetry's social function? (713-14, general question)

17. What does poets' status as "spirits of the most refined organization" allow them to accomplish? How is poetry redemptive, akin to religious experience? (714)

18. How do Shelley's statements on 714 that poetry "transmutes all that it touches" and "strips the veil of familiarity from the world" compare to Coleridge's remarks on 681 about imagination "balancing and reconciling opposite and discordant qualities"?

19. Are poets like other people, or are they very different from ordinary people? How much does it matter? (715-16)

20. Shelley ends his essay by claiming that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World." How does this sentence reflect the complexity, even the paradoxical nature, of his defense as a whole? (717)

21. Review the various metaphors Shelley employs to describe poetic inspiration and poetry's effects. How much do these metaphors have in common? How does Shelley's style in employing such a variety of figures reinforce his claims about the transformative powers of poetry? (See 710, 714, 717, for example)

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.