Remarks by Percy Bysshe Shelley | V2Melody Quotations

“The great poetry is always written by men who are capable of feeling intensely.”

Connecting poetic power with the depth and intensity of emotional experience. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The principle of equality is the only principle which can save mankind from the calamities which are impending over them.”

Expressing Shelley's conviction that equality was essential to humanity's future. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer.”

A concise expression of Shelley's concern with widening economic inequality. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“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.”

Shelley's radical criticism of economic inequality and political instability. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The vanity of the great is the source of much of the misery of mankind.”

Criticising pride and status-seeking as causes of human suffering. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to nothing but error and confusion.”

Warning that detached abstraction can lose contact with the richness of lived experience. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The function of the imagination is to create novel forms of the most familiar objects.”

Presenting artistic imagination as the renewal of familiar experience. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“A man cannot say, I will compose poetry. The most poetical mind is one which is naturally adapted to the expression of its own conceptions.”

Emphasising that poetry arises from imaginative temperament rather than deliberate manufacture. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The savage is to the civilized man, as the child is to the adult.”

An example of Shelley's early nineteenth-century theory of cultural development, expressed in the language of his period. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“A poet comprehends the words which express the relation of things, and these words are the elements of his art.”

Treating language and the relationships between things as the fundamental materials of poetry. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The great secret of morals is love.”

A compact expression of Shelley's belief that love lies at the heart of moral understanding. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The cold reasoner and the active mind are not necessarily opposed to each other.”

Resisting a simple opposition between rational thought and imaginative activity. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The mind is a mirror, not only reflecting, but itself creating, the forms of thought.”

Exploring the active rather than merely receptive nature of the human mind. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The parts of the poet's creation are themselves the elements of another creation.”

Suggesting that great imaginative works continue to generate new possibilities in those who encounter them. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The familiar objects of the world are changed by the presence of an imagination.”

Emphasising the transformative effect of imaginative perception on everyday reality. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, is a principal source of moral improvement.”

Linking intellectual discovery with humanity's moral development. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.”

Arguing that imagination is needed not merely to invent but to perceive the significance of what is already known. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.”

Reflecting Shelley's fascination with the strange sweetness that can accompany melancholy. · Letter, 1821

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

Suggesting that poetry can transform imperfect or troubling reality through artistic perception. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”

Portraying poetic creation as an act of singing through solitude rather than seeking an audience. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The language of poets is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension.”

Describing metaphor as a means of discovering relationships that ordinary language overlooks. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”

A vivid metaphor for poetry as a force that resists being contained or subordinated to a purpose. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry.”

Connecting the origins of language, society and poetry through the creative power of expression. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“To be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation between existence and perception, and between perception and expression.”

Defining poetic perception as an encounter with truth, beauty and the relations between things. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

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