A Defence of Poetry

Shelley's aim was to show that poets establish morality and inspire the legal norms in a civil society, thus creating a foundation for the other institutions of a community.

A Defence of Poetry argued that the invention of language reveals a human impulse to reproduce the rhythmic and ordered, so that harmony and unity are delighted in wherever they are found and incorporated, instinctively, into creative activities: "Every man in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which highest delight results..." This "faculty of approximation" enables the observer to experience the beautiful, by establishing a "relation between the highest pleasure and its causes".

For him, "Shakespeare, Dante, Milton (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power", and Bacon, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy are poets.

Social and linguistic order are not the sole products of the rational faculty, as language is "arbitrarily produced by the imagination" and reveals "the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension" of a higher beauty and truth.

Shelley's conclusive remark that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" suggests his awareness of "the profound ambiguity inherent in linguistic means, which he considers at once as an instrument of intellectual freedom and a vehicle for political and social subjugation".