Percy Shelley's "Defense"

I'd love to get the author of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc" to comment at length on form, but Percy Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" primarily responds to Peacock. Shelley does refer to the composite nature of poetic information, the formal and synthetic aspects of knowledge, but he doesn't go into the specifics one senses he might.

"He starts, "Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things" (516 Adams).

His "whole" hovers smokily around the sublime as per Plotinus, Kant, and perhaps his buddy Coleridge, but he's not here to go into an epistemology.

"Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent" clearly violates Saussure's later assumption of the arbitrary signifier. But note Shelley's talking about sentences, lines, stanzas, and so forth, not isolated words.

This raises some interesting questions. Even granted, for the moment, that the relation of signified to signifier might be completely arbitrary as per Saussure, sentence, phrase, line and so forth are not related so arbitrarily to concept. To clarify, that part of the chain of meaning that one might reasonably call arbitrary might not be the relation between sentence and thought so much as between sentence-thought and referent.

So, a typical classroom argument to demonstrate Saussure's arbitrary relation might run that neither the English table nor Spanish mesa resemble furniture or the idea of furniture. Even the English "cock-a-doodle-doo" bears but little resemblance to the Spanish "Qui qui ri quí" of a rooster that speaks el castellano verdadero. But "Traígame la mesa," and "Bring me the table" actually do resemble each other in significant ways, as discussed in Noam Chomsky's linguistic work from Syntactic Structures on.

Shelley, meanwhile, oblivious to my questions, continues to answer Thomas Peacock's concerns about social good, but we cross paths again in the structure of his insistence on the moral value of poetry.

"But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought"

Note these combinations -- Shelley, whether carefully or in passing, involves compositional aspects in his defense. He joins this with an idea that sounds right out of Keats:

The Great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautifiul which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own" (519).

Again we have an insistence on something which could be described structurally. His love constitutes very pointedly a "going out of our own nature," that is, a kind of visitation with or appreciation of an other.

The hints here seem buried in the form of his sentences, but I think there's a clearer statement of his aesthetics. The title below is lifted almost exactly from Plotinus. So here's a treat, an old favorite:

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,--visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,--
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, _5
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,--
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,--
Like memory of music fled,-- _10
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,--where art thou gone? _15
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, _20
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom,--why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever _25
To sage or poet these responses given--
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven.
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells--whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see, _30
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone--like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream, _35
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, _40
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes--
Thou--that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame! _45
Depart not as thy shadow came
Depart not--lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, _50
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard--I saw them not--
When musing deeply on the lot _55
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,--
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! _60

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine--have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers _65
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night--
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery, _70
That thou--O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past--there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, _75
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply _80
Its calm--to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Percy Shelley, 1816.