highest good

As Wu notes in the introductory footnote to P. B. Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s Defence was primarily influenced by William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802 and Sir Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie. Similar to Wordsworth’s defense of natural truth and the cleansing of distorted natural settings in Tintern Abbey, Shelley declares, “poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

While we are familiar with Wordsworth’s theory on poetry, here is a brief account of Sidney’s theories:

In his Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney declared that heroical poetry is the highest form of art, as it is able to “lead a man to virtue” by simultaneously teaching him “what virtue is.” Moreover, Sidney declares that this particular form of poetry stimulates the audience’s inherent virtue, while “making known his enemy, vice, which must be destroyed.” Sidney argues that the “right poets most properly do imitate to teach and delight; and to imitate, borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.”

Shelley, similar to Sidney, argues that poetry must record and reflect upon a natural image, while simultaneously, illustrating the natural virtue and divinity that exists within its natural beauty. Shelley declares, “poetry indeed is something divine.” Ironically, Shelley alludes to notions of the “highest good,” as he argues that “it is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense…sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good.” One is led to wonder: if Shelley is indeed an atheist (as has been documented), isn’t it problematic that he continually references the presence of virtue, divinity, and the ‘highest good’?

Wu, in his introductory biography of Shelley, states, “in truth, Percy’s attitude to God was more complex than the word ‘atheist’ suggests…he was tremendously attracted to the pantheist life-force of Tintern Abbey, and could not resist pleading the existence of a similar ‘Power’ in his poetry. Much of his poetry tacitly accepts the existence of a superhuman ‘Power’, but its moral character is not always clear.” Similarly, in his Defence, Shelley declares, “men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions (as in all others) a certain rhythm or order.” Clearly, Shelley implies that there is a sort of natural order that prevails in the natural world – perhaps this natural order is an example of Shelley’s belief in the Hierarchy of the Highest Good and the notions of a Pantheist Power. For, “a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.”

Moreover, Shelley’s fundamental notion of poetry is that “the great instrument of moral good is the imagination – and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.” Shelley primarily argues that poetry enlarges and catalyzes the imagination. He also states “poetry strengthens the faculty (the imagination) which is the organ of the moral nature of man…” Imagination, in this sense, is an active organ, which creates poetry that does not merely reproduce external stimulants, but supplements and interprets the omnipresent ‘moral good.’ Clearly, if Shelley was indeed an atheist in the truest sense of the word, he would not possess such an intense reverence for the imagination and the ‘higher purposes’ that the imagination is able to confirm through poetry.