mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head; when we consider that the great and permanent interests of human society become more and more the mainspring of intellectual pursuit; that, in proportion as they become so, the subordi- 5 nacy of the ornamental to the useful will be more and more seen and acknowledged, and that therefore the progress of useful art and science, and of moral and political knowledge, will continue more and more to withdraw attention from frivolous and unconducive to solid and conducive studies; that there- 10 fore the poetical audience will not only continually diminish in the proportion of its number to that of the rest of the reading public, but will also sink lower and lower in the comparison of intellectual acquirement; when we consider that the poet must still please his audience, and must therefore con- 15 tinue to sink to their level, while the rest of the community is rising above it; - we may easily conceive that the day is not distant when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been; and this not from any decrease either of intel- 20 lectual power or intellectual acquisition, but because intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better channels, and have abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry of modern rimesters, and their Olympic judges, the magazine 25 critics, who continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry as if it were still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, 30 and political economists, who have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and, knowing how small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect, smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed 35 perceptions with which the drivelers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the poetical palm and the critical chair. NOTES. 11. After the title I have omitted the sub-title, "Part I." See notes on 45 6 and 45 21. 1 10. The one is the rò Toleiv. Cf. Sidney, Defense 6 30. 1 13. The rò λoyíČew. Shelley inadvertently substitutes an active for the proper deponent form. 3 13-15. The future. . . the seed. Cf. 6 6-8: "He beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and fruit of latest time." And see 38 19-25. 4 28. Unapprehended. Cf. 11 21, 13 26, 46 25. 54-6. The same footsteps, etc. De Augment. Scient. cap. 1, lib. iii. (Shelley's note). Cf. Adv. Learning 2. 5. 3. 5 20-29. But poets religion. Cf. Shelley, Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients: "For all the inventive arts maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connection between each other, being no more than various expressions of one internal power, modified by different circumstances, either of an individual or of society." 61. Prophets. Cf. Sidney, Defense 5 12-16. 6 14-15. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one. Cf. the discussion in my edition of Sidney's Defense of Poesy, Introduction, p. xxix ff. 66 6 31-7 2. But poetry, etc., Cf. Plato, Symposium 205 (Shelley's trans.): Poetry, which is a general name signifying every cause whereby anything proceeds from that which is not into that which is; so that the exercise of every inventive art is poetry, and all such artists poets. Yet they are not called poets, but distinguished by other names; and one portion or species of poetry, that which has relation to music and rhythm, is divided from all others, and known by the name belonging to all." 7 14. Mirror. Shelley is partial to this figure. Cf. 10 30-32, 18 16, 19 6 ff., 24 11, 46 26. 8 13-18. Hence the language, etc. Cf. Sidney, Defense 5 33-34, 11 25-31, 33 19-24 8 19. Hence the vanity of translation. But cf. Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Th. 3, B. 11, quoted in Hayward, Statesmen and Writers 2. 307: "I honor both rhythm and rime, by which poetry first becomes poetry; but the properly deep and radically operative — the truly developing and quickening, is that which remains of the poet when he is translated into prose. The inward substance then remains in its purity and fulness; which, when it is absent, a dazzling exterior often deludes with the semblance of, and, when it is present, conceals." 8 30 ff. Yet it is, etc. Cf. Bagehot, Literary Studies 2. 351: But the exact line which separates grave novels in verse, like Aylmer's Field or Enoch Arden, from grave novels not in verse, like Silas Marner or Adam Bede, we own we cannot draw with any confidence. Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a narrative is thrown into verse or not certainly depends in part on the taste of the age, and in part on its mechanical helps. Verse is the only mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and there is little writing till a cheap something is found to write upon, and a cheap something to write with. . . . We need only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm than prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than prose." And see also Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets: "I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible without absolutely being so; namely, the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated some of the last into English rime, but the essence and the power of poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth, which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being 'married to immortal verse.' If it is of the essence of poetry to strike and fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to pass for poets in their way." To these add Sidney, Defense of Poesy 11 18-22: "Which I speak to show that it is not riming and versing that maketh a poet - -no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who, though he pleaded in armor, should be an advocate and no soldier." 98-19. Plato was essentially a poet, etc. To the same effect in Shelley's Preface to his translation of Plato's Symposium: "Plato exhibits the rare union of close and subtle logic with the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry, melted by the splendor and harmony of his periods into one irresistible stream of musical impressions, which hurry the persuasions onward as in a breathless career. His language is that of an immortal spirit rather than a man. Lord Bacon is, perhaps, the only writer who in these particulars can be compared with him; his imitator Cicero sinks in the comparison into an ape mocking the gestures of a man.” Cf. also Sidney, Defense 3 27, note. 9 20. Lord Bacon was a poet. See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Death particularly (Shelley's note). 10 9 ff. There is this difference, etc. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 9 1-3: "The real distinction between the poet and the historian is not found in the employment of verse by the former, and of prose by the latter, for, if we suppose the history of Herodotus to be versified, it would be nothing but history still, only now in a metrical form. The true ground of difference is that the historian relates what has taken place, the poet how certain things might have taken place. Hence poetry is of a more philosophical and serious character than history; it is, we might say, more universal and more ideal. Poetry deals with the general, history with the particular. Now the general shows how certain typical characters will speak and act, according to the law of probability or of necessity, as poetry indicates by bestowing certain names upon these characters, but the particular merely relates what Alcibiades, a historic individual, actually did or suffered." And see Sidney, Defense 18 25 ff. 10 27-29. Hence epitomes, etc. Cf. Bacon, Adv. Learning 2. 2. 4: "As for the corruptions and moths of history, which are epitomes, the use of them deserveth to be banished, as all men of sound judgment have confessed, as those that have fretted and corroded the sound bodies of many excellent histories, and wrought them into base and unprofitable dregs." 11 4-5. A single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought. Cf. 32 33-34 2: "Each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought." ... 11 5-12. And thus images. Cf. Sidney, Defense 4 5–15. Cf. 14 17, 39 28 ff.; also 41 13. 11 11. Interstices. 11 16-18. Poetry is 25 2, 29 19-26. ... with its delight. Cf. Sidney, Defense 23 13 12 3-7. The poems of Homer, etc. Cf. Sidney, Defense 2 27 ff. 12 7-8. Homer embodied, etc. Cf. Gladstone, Gleanings 2. 148: "Lofty example in comprehensive form is, without doubt, one of the great standing needs of our race. To this want it has been from the first one main purpose of the highest poetry to answer. The quest of Beauty leads all those who engage in it to the ideal or normal man, as the summit of attainable excellence. . . . The concern of Poetry with |