Two Defence[s] of Poetry
Shelley and the Newgate Magazine
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23456502 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephanie Kuduk Weiner (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Pages | 35-65 |
| Publication date | 2005-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9780230599680_3 |
| OpenAlex | W2476414450 |
| ISBN | 9780230599680 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 12 |
Raymond Williams has noted that Percy Shelley’s Defence of Poetry , like other Romantic theories of poetry, is ‘evidently compensatory,’ for ‘the height of the artists’ claim is also the height of their despair.’ 1 Williams traces this compensatory claim to the belief on the part of Romantic poets that the values they heralded as central to art and, often, to a just society, were precisely the opposite of ‘the principles on which the new society was being organized.’ 2 Yet Shelley’s position within this cultural landscape was further fraught, because the most vocal advocates of the new society were not enemies but allies: philosophical radicals such as Jeremy Bentham, infidel republicans such as Richard Carlile, and liberal anti-monarchists such as Thomas Love Peacock and William Hazlitt. What’s more, all of these thinkers were—or, significantly, had become in the 1820s—contemptuous critics of poetry. Peacock’s attitude toward poetry is perhaps more wry than contemptuous: critics have long described his The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) as half-serious, and his correspondence with Shelley suggests that his animosity toward poetry was intensified by his annoyance with Barry Cornwall and other authors of ‘drivelling doggrel’ and ‘mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.’ 3 Yet scholars such as Marilyn Butler have also argued that The Four Ages ‘puts the genuine utilitarian case—though it is in a deliberately provocative and extreme form.’ 4
Art · Art history · Literature · Poetry · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Philosophy · Science Education and Perceptions
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |