Percy Bysshe Shelley – A Defence of Poetry

I’ve probably got drafts of blogs of rambles past that could be convened here but nevertheless:

I wanted to include some of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry in my audio paper.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry

Shelley’s argument for poetry in his critical essay is written within the context of Romanticism. In 1858, William Stigant, a poet, essayist, and translator, wrote in his essay "Sir Philip Sidney"[5] that Shelley's "beautifully written Defence of Poetry" is a work which "analyses the very inner essence of poetry and the reason of its existence, – its development from, and operation on, the mind of man". Shelley writes in Defence that while "ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created," and leads to a moral civil life, poetry acts in a way that "awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought".

In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley argued that the invention of language reveals a human impulse to reproduce the rhythmic and ordered, so that harmony and unity are delighted in wherever they are found and incorporated, instinctively, into creative activities: "Every man in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which highest delight results..." This "faculty of approximation" enables the observer to experience the beautiful, by establishing a "relation between the highest pleasure and its causes". Those who possess this faculty "in excess are poets" and their task is to communicate the "pleasure" of their experiences to the community. Shelley does not claim language is poetry on the grounds that language is the medium of poetry; rather he recognises in the creation of language an adherence to the poetic precepts of order, harmony, unity, and a desire to express delight in the beautiful. Aesthetic admiration of "the true and the beautiful" is provided with an important social aspect which extends beyond communication and precipitates self-awareness. Poetry and the various modes of art it incorporates are directly involved with the social activities of life. Shelley nominated unlikely figures such as Plato and Jesus in their excellent use of language to conceive the inconceivable.

For Shelley, "poets ... are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society..." Social and linguistic order are not the sole products of the rational faculty, as language is "arbitrarily produced by the imagination" and reveals "the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension" of a higher beauty and truth. Shelley's conclusive remark that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" suggests his awareness of "the profound ambiguity inherent in linguistic means, which he considers at once as an instrument of intellectual freedom and a vehicle for political and social subjugation".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defence_of_Poetry

"to remove the obstacles which impede the free expression of the human mind"

As I’ve mentioned a few times by now I usually think of myself as a designer. I suppose that’s also because the nature of our hand-ins are like a brief.

I like the idea of being a poet.

If I wrote poetry would that make me a poet?

Does it matter what I think I am? what I want to be?

Our modern individualist identity dilemma. but what is a collective without individuals. a machine without mechanisms. a word without letters (though those letters mean nothing on their own).

I aim to use the fifth canto of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind in my audio paper:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

https://poets.org/poem/ode-west-wind

Philip Sydneys An Apology for Poetry : the idea that poetry creates a separate reality. I feel the same way about sound. Maybe its my connection with escapism, games and love of fiction.

Maybe you could define the act of editing sound as creating fiction.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction

I was thinking of maybe paring this with David Bowie’s version of Wild is the Wind.

“Make me thy lyre” “I hear the sound of mandolins”

the sound of the winds of change. The idea that the sound of revolt should be heard by all.

not nihilistic revolt.

Is this too much? Too many elements?

Land (earth), Wind (air)