extend the inquiry to his comedies;
and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are
equally incompatible with stage representation. The length to which
this essay has run, will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently
distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper
into the subject at present.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
1792-1822
A DEFENCE OF POETRY (1821)
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action,
which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered
as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another,
however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts
so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as
from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the
principle of its own integrity. The one is the [Greek: to poiein], or
the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which
are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the
[Greek: to logizein], or principle of analysis, and its action regards
the relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts,
not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations
which conduct to certain general results. 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. Reason is
to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the
spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of
the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is
an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions
are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an
Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.
But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within
all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and
produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of
the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite
them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions
of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even
as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A
child at p
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