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Audiobook edition · 3 h 11 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if poetry is not a luxury, but a power that shapes how we think, love and live together?
In A Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley answers a challenge from his friend Thomas Love Peacock. Peacock’s playful essay, The Four Ages of Poetry, treats poetry as a relic with little use in an age of science, trade and calculation. Shelley takes the question seriously: what does poetry give us that useful knowledge alone cannot?
This collection follows Shelley’s thinking beyond poetry into love, the mind, death and religion. On Love explores our attraction toward what lies beyond ourselves. Throughout these essays, you meet a Romantic poet arguing from large principles in rich, glowing prose. His questions ask for patience, but invite you to reconsider the purpose of imagination.
What you’ll discover
- A friendship in debate Follow Shelley’s serious reply to Peacock’s playful doubt about poetry’s place in society.
- Two powers of thought Explore the distinction between reason and imagination that supports Shelley’s defence of poetry.
- Language begins in images Consider Shelley’s claim that the first speakers are poets, shaping words through images and sounds.
- Sympathy at the centre Discover why Shelley connects moral life with love and the ability to enter another’s experience.
- Questions beyond poetry Turn to essays on love, mind, death and religion that carry his inquiry further.
Who will love it
You will love this book if you enjoy poetry and the ideas behind it, if you like thinkers who mix feeling with argument, or if you wonder what art is for.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Love and wonder break the haze of habit
- Wishing for an afterlife is not evidence
- Punishing by death harms the society it protects
- The mind builds everything from perception, even dreams
- Goodness grows from imagination and from attention to differences
- Athens shows what a people can build and lack
- Poetry makes people good by enlarging imagination
- Without poetry, knowledge cannot make a just world
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Difesa della poesia e altri saggi
A poet sings in the dark like a nightingale, and Shelley says that poet writes the laws nobody sees.
Challenging2–5 hours to readItaliano
Excellent
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In short
Why do we stop wondering at the night sky, the sea, and our own lives? Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English poet who died in 1822, blames habit, and he offers poetry as the cure.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Love and wonder break the haze of habit
The book opens with On Love. Shelley says love is the pull toward whatever lies beyond ourselves. Each of us carries an inner picture of an ideal self, and we hunt for its match in another mind.
We want a listener for our reasoning, an echo for our imagination, and a heart to answer ours. When no person answers, we turn to flowers, water, and sky and feel a secret kinship with them. When this longing dies, a person becomes a living tomb.
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Which edition is right for me
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas of the whole book in about 14 minutes. A good first look, or a refresher.
Details
- Language
- Italiano
- Reading time
- 2 h 5 min
- Level
- Challenging
Cite this edition
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/a-defence-of-poetry-and-other-essays.
Shelley, P. B. (2026). A defence of poetry and other essays. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/a-defence-of-poetry-and-other-essays
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/a-defence-of-poetry-and-other-essays.
@book{shelley2026defence,
author = {Shelley, Percy Bysshe},
title = {A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/a-defence-of-poetry-and-other-essays}
}
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What is A Defence of Poetry about?
It argues that poetry, in a broad sense, is the expression of imagination, and that imagination is the root of morality, law, language, and the arts. Shelley answers those who rank reasoning above poetry and explains what poets give to society.
What does unacknowledged legislators mean in Shelley's essay?
It means poets shape the ideas and feelings a society lives by before laws exist. They interpret an inspiration the age does not yet understand, so their influence works quietly, without official recognition.
What other essays are in this collection?
Besides the Defence, it holds On Love, On Life, On a Future State, On the Death Penalty, Speculations on Metaphysics and on Morals, an essay on the Athenians, and a preface to Plato's Banquet.
The author
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792–1822 · English Romantic poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English poet born in Sussex in 1792. He lived in England and moved to Italy in 1818. He wrote poetry, plays and essays, including Prometheus Unbound, published in 1820, and A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821. He drowned off the Italian coast in 1822.
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