Shelley

On excerpt from A Defense of Poetry:

The moral duty of poetry, the emotional nature of poetry, the enlightened poet, the sensitive poet, the inspired poet. Cliches that most people still find relevant.

Shelley’s syntax is part of what makes him sound so arrogant. Also the statements of universals, ethnocentricity: the “savage.” At least he acknowledges that cultures are different in a sort of equal way (at least they were “in the youth of the world”). That redeems him a little.

A damn good point in class; modern poetry is sposed to be for the poet, used to be sposed to be for the court / populace.

Shelley says expression of emotion/imagination has as its purpose “to prolong…a consciousness of the cause.” Why a consciousness? I could see us wanting to prolong the pleasurable feeling, but why would a child want to be especially aware of what made hir happy? Curse Shelley’s denseness. Consciousness of emotional response --> consciousness of self: consciousness of self = pleasure?

A glimpse of how radical Shelley is: “…there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings [emphasis mine]…” There are things other than humans that are sentient? Gasp!

Shelley tries to be a poet/scientist/philosopher, but acknowledges his role as poet as highest.

“Man in society” becomes source of pleasure: we like making fun of people, even ourselves, and we like talking about how we interact with each other. Here the cause and effect blend, and we talk about talking about how we interact, i.e. poetry about writing poetry or studying education. But after that the paragraph gets real confusing, and I never get a solid sense of how lawmakers are poets except that they study interactions and relations between people. All that flowery goo about the future being “contained within the present, as the plant within the seed” doesn’t make much sense either. My brain’s tryin’ to make connections but they’re just not gettin' there.

Poetry = Art.