“The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of…” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry.”

Seeing poetry as a force accompanying social and intellectual transformation. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley

About Percy Bysshe Shelley

4 August 1792–8 July 1822

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, the Shelley family home near Horsham in Sussex, and died on 8 July 1822, drowned in the Gulf of Spezia off the Italian coast before he had reached his thirtieth birthday. The extraordinary compression of his life has encouraged a legend of Shelley as the…

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Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

More remarks by Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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

“The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.”

Arguing that imagination enables the moral understanding of other people. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

“The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.”

Defining moral feeling as imaginative sympathy with others and with beauty · A Defence of Poetry

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Percy Bysshe Shelley — a remark

About Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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