Poetry, Art and Civilization Today: Reflections on Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry"

July 8, 2022, marked the 200th anniversary of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s tragic drowning in the Bay of Lerici, Italy, at the age of 31. However, before he died Shelley left the world with one of the most impassioned and timeless defences of poetry ever composed. At a time in which Western civilization appears almost rudderless—with virtually no vision or sagely wisdom animating its institutions—Shelley’s timeless reflections on the relationship between poetry and civilization remain as relevant as they have ever been.

In his essay, which he composed a year before he died, Shelley articulated the view that poetry plays a particularly important role in times of great civilizational crisis and critical change. He argued that poetry performs one of the most practical and essential functions in society: it informs the imagination—understood as the realm in which corruption, degeneracy (whether intellectual or moral), and false axiomatic thinking first take root. The cultivation of a genuin…