"There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds."
— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Edward Moxon
Date
w. 1821, 1840
Metaphor
"There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds."
Metaphor in Context
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
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>
Date of Entry
10/03/2006
