English Literature / Unit 13 ENL 1213 short lesson, about 20 seconds
A Defence of Poetry
Captions available
The idea
Shelley wrote A Defence of Poetry in eighteen twenty-one, answering Thomas Love Peacock's essay "The Four Ages of Poetry"; it was published only in eighteen forty. Poets are "the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and "the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
In practice
Poets as legislators.
Where people slip
It answers Peacock, and through him Plato.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
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