labours." These gay
shafts had at any rate the merit of stinging Shelley to action. 'The
Defence of Poetry' was his reply. People like Peacock treat poetry, and
art generally, as an adventitious seasoning of life--ornamental perhaps,
but rather out of place in a progressive and practical age. Shelley
undermines the whole position by asserting that poetry--a name which
includes for him all serious art--is the very stuff out of which all
that is valuable and real in life is made. "A poem is the very image
of life expressed in its eternal truth." "The great secret of morals
is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of
ourselves with the beautiful that exists in thought, action, or person,
not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and
comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many
others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The
great instrument of moral good is the imagination." And it is on the
imagination that poetry works, strengthening it as exercises strengthen
a limb. Historically, he argues, good poetry always coexists with good
morals; for instance, when social life decays, drama decays. Peacock had
said that reasoners and mechanical inventors are more useful than poets.
The reply is that, left to themselves, they simply make the world
worse, while it is poets and "poetical philosophers" who produce "true
utility," or pleasure in the highest sense. Without poetry, the progress
of science and of the mechanical arts results in mental and moral
indigestion, merely exasperating the inequality of mankind. "Poetry and
the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are
the God and mammon of the world." While the emotions penetrated by
poetry last, "Self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."
Poetry's "secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters
which flow from death through life." It makes the familiar strange,
and creates the universe anew. "Poets are the hierophants of an
unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which
futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they
understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what
they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Other poets besides Shelley have seen

"Through all that earthly dress
Bright shoots of everlas