A Defence of Poetry is an essay by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840) . It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".
It was written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock's article The Four Ages of Poetry which had been published in 1820. Shelley wrote to the publishers Charles and James Ollier (who were also his own publishers):
- I am enchanted with your Literary Miscellany, although the last article has excited my polemical faculties so violently that the moment I get rid of my ophthalmia, I mean to set about an answer to it. . . . It is very clever, but I think, very false.'
To Peacock Shelley wrote:
- Your anathemas against poetry itself excited me to a sacred rage. . . . I had the greatest possible desire to break a lance with you . . . in honour of my mistress Urania.
A Defence of Poetry was eventually published, with some edits by John Hunt, posthumously by Shelley's wife Mary Shelley in 1840.
Read more about A Defence Of Poetry: From Editorial Introductions To "A Defence of Poetry", Major Themes
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