Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

A Defence of Poetry [from Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments]

London

Edward Moxon

w. 1821, 1840

"But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men."

Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life. They make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labor, let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, "To him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away." The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.

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Reading

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>

10/03/2006