Reason is merely an organizational power; effective only because of the agency of the creative principle: “making” / “synthesis”
Reason > Imagination
Instrument > Agent
Body > Spirit
Shadow > Substance (1015)
Poetry is “the expression of the Imagination” (1015): also employs the metaphor of the aeolian harp, but his poet “harmonizes” with the harp; is not simply played upon
Poets are unlike others in that they have an “excess” of communication with “the beautiful”.
The “beautiful” can be seen as a synonym for the “imagination”. It is an ideal that exists beyond the physical world of change, mortality, and suffering. A Platonic ideal of a sphere adjacent but separate from the physical world: a world of “Forms”. So the “Beautiful” not the “beautiful”.
“A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one” (1017/1)
Poetry, because it expresses itself through language, a medium that does not require an instrument is closest to direct engagement with the “Beautiful” (1017/2), and because it is not dependent on the narration of facts, it is more powerful than prose: “The one (prose) is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never recur; the other is universal” (1018). In reflecting the eternal, poetry stands outside of time.
“Poetry acts in another and diviner manner [than science]. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of at hougsand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lis the veil from the hidden beatify of th eowld, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (1018/2)
It is moral because it teaches “Love”: a going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exits in thought, action, person, not our own” (1019/1)
“Poetry strengthens that faculty which I the organ of the moral nature of man [the Imagination], in the same mamer as exercise strengthens a limb” (1019)
Makes even the tragic beautiful and thus moves the reader beyond pain to awareness of “the unfathomable agencies of nature” (1019/2)
Two kinds of pleasure (1020/1); again, reverses the accepted terms:
Imagination: durable, universal, permanent
Reason: transitory and particular
“Poetry is indeed something divine” (1021)
Shelley employs that “vitally metaphoric” (1016/2) language of the Poet in his prose
Shelley backs away from making “Poetry” too material a thing
centre and circumference of knowledge
root and blossom of all thought
surface and bloom of things
odour and color vs. texture of the rose
“form and splendour of unfaded beauty” not “anatomy and corruption” (1021/2)
A function that is beyond reason and beyond will, rather a type of possession by the Imagination and of the Imagination: “[Poets] are yet compelled to serve the Power which is seated upon the throne of their own soul” (1023/2)
Shelley’s emphasis on the creation rather than the product: “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet” (1022/1)
“the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own . . .”
Poetry “compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know” (1022/2)
Concludes by announcing a great age of poetry and its “electric life”:
“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 to 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” (1023/2)