"These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world"[1] and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge."
— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Edward Moxon
Date
w. 1821, 1840
Metaphor
"These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world"[1] and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge."
Metaphor in Context
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world"[1] and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley (London: Edward Moxon, 1840). <Link to Google Books
Text from the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, based on the Harvard Classics series, 1909. <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/shelley-poetry.html>
Text from the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, based on the Harvard Classics series, 1909. <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/shelley-poetry.html>
Theme
Meta-metaphorical
Date of Entry
10/03/2006
