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accumulates, poetry, as pure imagination, also augments its distance around its circle. “Poetry,” says Shelley, “magnifies the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever-new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts.”34 This magnification process in the poetics of beauty and delight is ever infinitely self-multiplying and self-expanding. In this majestic state of infinite self-becoming, where aesthetic thoughts enlighten and pour their ecstatic light on more thoughts, the mind begins to reject everything quotidian, everything banal. The mind begins to embellish itself, in virtue of its beloved relationship with beauty and delight, with the highest sentiments and ideals of the good: the poet that apprehends truth and beauty through the imagination reflects his brilliant mirror upon humankind. The “state of mind produced by poetry,” Shelley argues, is one “at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions.”35
In this sense, high poetry has a positive impact on society somewhat reflective of Plato’s ideals of poets as moral agents. If poets are the legislators of the world, poetry is that which legislates the world. Poets are not only supreme creators, artists, and teachers who apprehend the invisible forms of religion, but also ‘the legislators or prophets’ and ‘founders of civil society.’36 The poet as prophet, disassociated from fortune telling or the coming of events, is a creature that, drowning in the present, can grasp the future. “His thoughts are the germs of the flowers and the fruit of the latest time”37 reminiscent of Hegel’s theory of history where “bud turns blossom turns fruit.”38 Because the poet is not an oracle, prophecy can never be the mother of poetry, but only the mother of prophecy. Moreover, Shelley believes that all things and forms, all socio-political-religious events are instruments for poetry. The poetic springs up, then, as a symbol of liberty and life in the symbolic imagination that desires to rebuild the senses anew. Shelley reiterates that it is literature’s blossom that nurtures the necessity of civil and religious freedom in the nation’s will.39 As such, poetry’s role is also revolutionary. It is the “unfailing herald, companion, and follower of
the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion, or institution.”40
34 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 520 35 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 527 36 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 976
37Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 976 38 Hegel. Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
39 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 529 40 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 529
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