2. • Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically
regarded among the finest poets in the English language.
• A Defence of Poetry is an essay by Shelley, written in 1821. It
contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.”
• Shelley does not claim language is poetry on the grounds that
language is the medium of poetry; rather he recognizes in the
creation of language an adherence to the poetic precepts or order,
harmony, unity, and a desire to express delight in the beautiful.
• Poetry and the various modes of art it incorporates are directly
involved with social activities of life. For Shelley, 'poets ... are not
only authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of
laws, and the founders of civil society."
4. • Coleridge was an English Romantic poet, literary critic
and philosopher. He is probably best known for his poems
The Rime of The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well
as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.
• In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential
pieces of literary criticism including Biographia Literaria,
a collection of his thoughts and opinions on literature
which he published in 1817.
5. • Biographia Literaria delivered both biographical
explanations of the author's life as well as his impressions
on literature. The collection also contained an analysis of a
broad range of philosophical principles of literature
ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling
and applied them to the poetry of peers as Wordsworth.
• Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were
popular topics of discourse in academic communities
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S. Eliot
stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the
greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last".
6. • According to Coleridge, a poem is to be judged not as a
mirror of truth -- as we judge science -- but as a thing in
itself, almost as a living organism, which cannot be
measured by extrinsic standards, but only by its own
internal consistency: "nothing can permanently please,
which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so,
and not otherwise."
• The organic unity of a poem is not something which can
be imposed by adherence to mechanical rules but must
derive from the poet's Imagination -- a supremely vital gift
of the few.
7. • According to Coleridge, ideal poets are born and not
made; ideal poems may be judged only according to their
own lights and not according to any established precept or
precedent; their quality is in a very direct sense derived
from the quality of the mind of their creator. This gave
Coleridge a freedom in respect of assessing both modern
and Elizabethan poets (particularly Shakespeare) which
no previous critic had enjoyed: their works were not to be
judged by extrinsically defined or artificially imposed
standards but in terms of their imaginative coherence.
8. • It is clear that Coleridge himself envisaged the poet as a
man of great integrity as well as of special gifts,
producing poems which would offer profound insights
into man's imagination, psychological, and ultimately,
moral being.
• The narrow-minded features of neoclassicism and of
literature seen simplistically as a 'mirror' of reality died
with Coleridge.
• According to Coleridge, poetry is about itself and for
itself, art for art's sake.
10. • Arnold is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, along
with Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. Culture and
Anarchy, Arnold's major work in social criticism. Literature
and Dogma, Arnold's major work in religious criticism.
• Some consider Arnold to be the bridge between Romanticism
and Modernism. His use of symbolic landscapes was typical of
the Romantic era, while his skeptical and pessimistic
perspective was typical of the Modern era.
• He felt that poetry should be the ‘criticism of life’ and express
a philosophy. Arnold’s philosophy is that true happiness comes
from within, and that people should seek within themselves for
good, while being resigned in acceptance of outward things and
avoiding the pointless turmoil of the world.
11. • Arnold is more concerned with the poetry of religion and
its virtues and values for society than with the existence of
God.
• Arnold wrote that, “Without poetry, our science will
appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us
for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry”.
He considered the most important criteria used to judge
the value of a poem were “high truth” and “high
seriousness”
• Further, Arnold thought the works that had been proven to
possess both “high truth” and “high seriousness”, such as
those of Shakespeare and Milton, could be used as a basis
of comparison to determine the merit of other works of
poetry.
