Skip to content

Quotes from A Defence of Poetry — Percy Bysshe Shelley

1792–1822 England

← All quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

11 quotes

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

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

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

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

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Percy Bysshe Shelley (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.