poets and prose

Percy Bysshe Shelley defines to great lengths who he believes the poets of our world are in his essay A Defence of Poetry. He does not merely confine his definition of poets as those who are the creators of, “language… music… dance… architecture… statuary… and painting,” because his definition of poets also establishes that, “they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.”

This liberal definition of poetry and the poet creates a framework where it is accurate for Shelley to claim that there is wrongful distinction between poetry and prose; “The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error” Shelly’s assertion here draws great parallels to William Wordsworth’s own views on poetry. Both Shelley and Wordsworth seem in accordance with the fact that there is too much critical emphasis in finding poets who commit errors by including prose in their poetry.

Wordsworth strongly asserts in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802 that in the world of the poet, prose is a viable method of literary transmission: “…the language of Prose may yet be well adapted to Poetry; and I have previously asserted that a large portion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good Prose.”

Both authors’ seem open to the idea that the expansion of literary methods and the acceptance of new poetic forms is a positive evolution for the poet. They were both accepting of poetry outside of its traditional form. This similarity might help in defining who the great Romantic poets were; possibly, they were those who dared to be unconventional.