It doesn’t feel old, not at all, but it did feel male. Very male. Exclusively so. And so I’ve done a little intervention here. I’m not convinced it’s effective. Or even interesting…but I couldn’t resist myself either so I offer it here. It’s worth rereading in any case, right? If Twitter is any indication it certainly is worth reading again.
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1 comment
Stewart Cole says:
Dec 5, 2012
Probably the single most important (English-language) poetic statement of the past 200 years, because pretty much every subsequent theorist of poetics finds herself responding, whether consciously or not, to one or another of its claims. Many of these claims – the implication that poetry’s rootedness in tropes of correspondence means that it inherently embodies the desire for social/political/spiritual cohesion, for example, or the infamous “legislators” flourish of the final sentence – continue to be dismissed as delusions, but can more productively be thought of as *aspirations*. At its root the _Defence_ is Shelley’s account of poetry as what it is: an aspirational artform. All poets should know this text. Kudos to Lemon Hound for showcasing it.