A Defense of Poetry (Yale University's Albert S. Cook)

"This essay was written in reply to an attack made on the contemporary verse by Shelley's friend Peacock, -- not a favourable specimen of Peacock's writing. The Defense, we can see, was hurriedly composed, and it remains a fragment, being only the first of three projected parts. It contains a good deal of historical matter, highly iinteresting, but too extensive to be made use of here. Being polemical, it no doubt exaggerates such of Shelley's views as collided with those of his antagonist. But besides beign the only full expression of these views, it is the most mature, for it was written within eighteen months of his death. It appears to owe very little either to Wordsworth's PREFACES or to Coleridge's BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA; but there are a few reminiscences of Sidney's APOLOGY, wich Shelley had read just before he wrote his own DEFENCE; and it shows, like much of his mature poetry, how deeply he was influenced by the more imaginative dialogues of Plato."

On A.C. Bradley's "Shelley's View of Poetry" (1904)

Ensaios / Literatura Estrangeira / Poemas, poesias